

JEROME cM. ANDERSON 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 



A .? 573 — 

Chap. Copyright No,.___. 

Shell JL-5-_.f\ ! 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 




Books by Jerome H. Hndcrson 

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LOTUS PUBLISHING COMPANY 

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THE 



Evidence of Immortality 



BY 



JEROME A. ANDERSON, M. D 

AUTHOR OF " REINCARNATION, " ETC. 



There dwelleth in the heart of every creature, O Arj'una, the Master, 
Ishvara.—BHA GA V AD-GIT A. 



SAN FRANCISCO 
THE LOTUS PUBLISHING COMPANY 

1170 MARKET STREET 

1899 



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■ft? si 3 „ 



43626 

Copyright July, 1899 
By Jerome A. Anderson 



TWO COPIES RECEIVED. 

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Press of the Academy Printing House San Francisco 






TO 



THE THREE AS YET UNREQUITED SERVITORS OF HUMANITY 



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CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I page 

The Exaggekated Importance op Thought . . 1 

CHAPTER II 

Sense-Consciousness . 8 

CHAPTER III 

Thought and Imagination 16 

CHAPTER IV 

Thought, Reason, Intuition, Instinct, and Feeling 23 

CHAPTER V 

Effect of Death upon the Consciousness of Life 34 

CHAPTER VI 
Effect of Death upon the Senses .... 43 

CHAPTER VII 

Effect of Death upon the Desire-Consciousness . 52 

CHAPTER VIII 

Effect of Death upon Thought and Imagination . 57 

CHAPTER IX 
Effect of Death upon Intuition and Feelings . 69 



vi CONTENTS 

CHAPTER X 
The Mortal and the Immortal Man ... 72 

CHAPTER XI 
The Process of Death 79 

CHAPTER XII 
The Re-Embodiment of the Soul .... 88 

CHAPTER XIII 
The Nature of the Soul 113 

CHAPTER XIV 
Can the Dead Communicate? 123 

CHAPTER XV 
The Home of the Soul 135 



APPENDIX I 
In Deeper Dreamland 141 

APPENDIX II 

The World's Crucified Saviours .... 156 



INTRODUCTION 



This essay is an examination from a scientific view- 
point into the probability of the continued existence of 
human life after the death of the body. Of course, by 
scientific is meant the light of reason applied to the phe- 
nomena of life — not a demonstration by means of the 
microscope or balances. Perhaps philosophical would be 
a better word to use in describing its method, but as all 
true science is philosophical, and all true philosophy 
scientific, the writer is not disposed to insist too strongly 
upon the term used. It is believed that a careful analysis 
of undisputed phenomena of existence, which have been 
perhaps overlooked, or which have not been assigned their 
proper importance, will establish the truth of the persist- 
ence of life beyond the grave as certainly as any other fact 
of existence. It will assuredly place it upon a much 
firmer basis than that enjoyed by many of the accepted 
scientific hypotheses, such as those which attempt to 
prove the existence and functions of the ether, atoms, 
matter itself, etc. 

Certainly, there can be no topic of greater or more pro- 
found interest to the human mind than that of its own 
survival after death. But, as is so often the case, the 
proof has been sought for afar when it lay immediately at 
hand ; has been accredited to divine revelation in books, 
instead of to divine revelations in nature. The writer is 
willing to go so far as to assert that if the proof of the ex- 



viii THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

istence of the soul after death be not demonstrable from 
the phenomena of this present life by cold-blooded, scien- 
tific reasoning from the known to the unknown, then it is 
a chimera, and we may as well relegate it to the dogmatist 
and fanatic, and have done with it forever. In this asser- 
tion he is in perfect sympathy with the thought in Hegel's 
mind when he wrote, " All that God is he imparts and re- 
veals, and He does so at first in and through nature." All 
mysteries stand revealed first, last, and all the time, in na- 
ture, had we but eyes to see and hearts to comprehend. 
So, let us seek in nature for the answer to this problem, 
Do we live after death ? 



The Evidence of Immortality 



CHAPTER I 



THE EXAGGERATED IMPORTANCE OF THOUGHT 



"y^^OGITO, ergo sum," wrote Des Cartes after 
y ^ realizing the great truth that the source 
and meaning of life must be sought with- 
in. It was a terse, startling statement, and was at 
once seized upon by the large class who take their 
thinking at second-hand. But never was a philo- 
sophical truth more perverted. Translated as "I 
think, therefore I exist," it has been made a shibbo- 
leth by those who sail in shallow philosophical seas. 
A better translation would have been, "I think, 
therefore I am," thus linking life with the idea of 
eternal being, rather than with an "out-from," tran- 
sitory existence. Neither Des Cartes nor his best in- 
terpreters limited it to thought alone, but included 
with it other phases of consciousness. The original 
meaning of Des Cartes has thus been quite lost sight 
of, and attention directed wholly to thought as the 
sole phenomenon of existence, the one proof of life, 
the single and distinguishing attribute of the human 
soul. The error has grown and widened until 'it 



2 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

taints the entire philosophy of the West and is the 
direct cause of much of the uncertainty which sur- 
rounds existence after death. Thought, as most men 
conceive of it, is certainly destroyed by death, and 
having been taught to look upon man as a thinker 
only, and upon existence as depending upon thought, 
men have been driven either to deny existence after 
death altogether, as do modern materialists, or to 
set up a future life incongruous to, and ethically 
disconnected with, that of the present, as do modern 
Christians. The latter, indeed, have put forward 
many theories to bridge the ethical chasm between 
this life and the heaven or hell of the next, such as 
vicarious atonement, predestination, forgiveness, 
and other unjust and unjustifiable hypotheses, but 
all have signally failed when ethically examined. 

The error, originated in part, at least, in the man- 
ner indicated, has been perpetuated because of the 
exaggerated importance given to this earth-life as 
counterbalancing eternity. Thought is of para- 
mount importance to this life, but plays a minor 
part, indeed, in the drama of eternal life. It ceases 
to be the dominant faculty, for reasons which we 
shall examine hereafter, when man passes beyond 
the threshold of death. To one engaged in blast- 
ing a drill is essential; to a farmer, some variant 
of the plow. So to the soul, while investigating the 
phenomena of an unexplored universe, the power 
to reason from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from 
the group of phenomena to the underlying law of 



EXAGGERATED IMPORTANCE OF THOUGHT 3 

which they are the apparently diverse expression, is 
absolutely essential. But just as the miner who 
turns his attention to extracting the gold from the 
quartz which he has blasted needs and uses other 
tools, so man, when he passes from this life of 
struggle and active comparison to one of rest and 
recuperation, lays aside his faithful servant, reason, 
to use other equally divine, and now more import- 
ant, faculties of his soul. 

Thought is truly a divine faculty, but an exceed- 
ingly imperfect one at the present stage of man's 
evolution. Most of the wars and woes under which 
mankind suffer today are the direct result of faulty 
thinking; of drawing differing conclusions from the 
same or similar data. Nor is this fault found wholly 
among the ignorant. It invades the very highest 
philosophic reasoning and has led to such widely 
varying schools as Idealists, Materialists, Theists, 
and Pantheists, and so on, each of which supports 
its claims by the most searching appeal to reason of 
which it is capable. " Holy wars " mark the path- 
ways of blind belief attempting to force its own 
convictions upon others; philosophy has also its 
anathemas, while no two scientists are at one on 
any of the fundamentals of their respective de- 
partments.* 

This lack of agreement ought to have warned man 
that thought was a somewhat frail reed upon which 

* See J. B. Stallo's "Some Modern Concepts" if one desires the 
exact proof of this. 



4 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

to lean, and to have led him to search for something 
more stable. But so ingrained is the idea of thought 
as the sine qua non of existence that with many, 
and, indeed, with most, Western thinkers cessation 
of thought is synonymous with the cessation of life. 
Existence without thought is to them absurd and 
even unthinkable. " I think, therefore I exist," 
is the reading which they now give their shibboleth. 

This is not so strange when we consider that every 
phenomenon of life is intended to and does provoke 
thought — else we would be but as cattle upon the 
hills. For this reason the very form of man is con- 
structed so as to afford the largest cerebral develop- 
ment possible, as well as to ensure it the most com- 
plete protection from injury. Thought is compelled 
into activity by the incessant bombardment of the 
senses; its dormant powers evoked, nolens volens, 
by the environment in which the body is placed. 
So intentionally hostile is this environment that 
man would speedily be swept from the earth but for 
thought. He must rely upon it at all times. It is 
his sword, of which he has thrown away the scab- 
bard; the one gift which enables him to have "do- 
minion over all the creatures of the earth." But its 
activity ceases at death. The magnificent cerebral 
development is destroyed; the bombardment of the 
senses ceases, thought no longer is king, and we 
have to look to the energies of other faculties for 
evidence of the permanence of life. 

Even a superficial analysis of man's conscious- 



EXAGGERATED IMPORTANCE OF THOUGHT 5 

ness reveals its compound nature and shows con- 
clusively that thought is only one of many faculties 
of the soul. Just as the prism breaks up the seem- 
ing unity and purity of the white light into seven 
startlingly dissimilar, and even opposite, constitu- 
ents, so analysis shows that which seemed but the 
one consciousness to be composed of similarly diver- 
sified, and also apparently opposing, faculties. 

As a fundamental faculty we have the conscious- 
ness of life itself; the recognition of existence. 
There is no doubt that man shares this conscious- 
ness with all the lower kingdoms of nature. With 
Des Cartes he may go to thought to prove that he 
exists, but he need not do so to peel that he does. 
Reason is entirely unnecessary to this recognition. 
Indeed, in the animal kingdom, it has been termed 
an instinct, because of the careful protection of 
their lives by animals devoid of reason. Even the 
sensitive plant shrinks from the touch lest its exist- 
ence be endangered, and all nature cries out with 
one voice, " Let me live ! let me live ! " 

It is the undifferentiated consciousness of the 
great ocean of Being, in which all that is exists. It 
vibrates through the rock; it is quivering in the 
massive oak. " Out of nothing nothing can come ; " 
and the recognition of this first divine thrill of ex- 
istence did not arise with man, nor even with the 
kingdoms immediately beneath him. It is univer- 
sal; it arose in and with the first faint flutter which 
attracted the atoms of star dust — if, indeed, it does 



6 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

not long antedate this. Its first expression may be 
one great cosmic, hierarchial note, which, perhaps, 
voices an ecstacy that each succeeding differentia- 
tion in form may lessen rather than increase. The 
bliss of being is certainly not so perfect in man at 
present as in the lower, unthinking kingdoms, for it 
is tainted with doubt and uncertainty, its joys are 
recognized as fleeting, its course saddened by the 
knowledge of the gulf of apparent extinction, from 
which there is no possible escape, which awaits its 
seeming close. The animal takes no thought; it 
eats, drinks, and is contented; for it tomorrow con- 
tains no hint of ceasing to be. Only when life is 
endangered does it seek to save it; while life flows 
its natural course the animal simply is. With the 
animal it is "I am," not "I exist." 

It must be evident to the dullest comprehension 
that the consciousness of life, of being, pervades all 
nature, and that man holds no monopoly of it. It 
is also evident that he does not depend upon his 
fleeting, constantly changing body for its manifes- 
tation. He may do so, to be sure, for its manifesta- 
tion in that body, but to remove this by death 
only causes the indestructible principle to change 
its vehicle for manifestation. For no manifested, 
and therefore limited, life can be except it have a 
material form to focus and limit that manifesta- 
tion. Even illimitable Space itself is but the body 
of God; its formlessness the silent testimony of a 
Divinity above and beyond all form limitations. 



EXAGGERATED IMPORTANCE OF THOUGHT 7 

So that man, unless by some unthinkable process 
we suppose him either inside, or outside of space, 
must always have a body, even though in the last 
differentiation this be but the body of God — with 
whom he would then be at one. Compelled by 
death to abandon the gross physical body, he 
would still feel the same certainty of existence in 
inner and more ethereal bodies, until, if all matter 
we can comprehend be stripped off, his conscious- 
ness would exist in space and possess a body of 
which not even infinite power could deprive him. 



CHAPTER II 



SENSE-CONSCIOUSNESS 



ANOTHER faculty of the soul, or mode of 
consciousness, is that of sense-perception. 
Man's body is composed of numerous or- 
gans; some sensory, some for locomotion, some for 
thought, others for desire, and still others for vital 
or for purely assimilative purposes, and all intend- 
ed to enable him to contact this plane of being, 
maintain his foothold here, and to assimilate the 
wisdom accruing out of his manifold experiences. 
The sensory organs are so constructed as to inter- 
cept, and enable him to take conscious note of, vi- 
brations covering a vast, but very incomplete, arc 
of the infinite cycle of life. From smell or touch 
up to the almost infinitely rapid vibrations of 
color, his differing organs record the impressions or 
sensations produced by vibrations reaching him 
from without. There is, however, such a great hi- 
atus between the higher and the lower of these as 
to more than suggest the possibility of his evolving 
other sense organs to enable him to contact still 
wider areas of sensuous existence hereafter. Put- 
ting this aside for the present, we find the range of 
his sense-consciousness to be so great, and its recep- 



SENSE-CONSCIOUSNESSS 9 

tion of impressions by constant contact with ma- 
terial things so multitudinous, that he has all his 
attention fully occupied if he segregates, analyzes, 
and gathers the ethical meaning of the phenomena 
with which they bring him into relation. So again 
we see the necessity of thought as the dominant 
faculty during embodiment upon earth. 

Like other animals, man's response to sense-im- 
pressions must always have been, and still is, 
largely mechanical. But as evolutionary ages 
rolled by, there was accomplished the conscious 
segregation or differentiation of these stimuli into 
great classes and the consequent specialization of 
organs therefor, and so gradually and impercepti- 
bly was built up man's present sense-organs. Just 
how these sense-impressions reach the soul, the 
transient tenant of the body, is not within the 
province of our present inquiry; suffice it to say 
that the unity of source of all consciousness consti- 
tutes a common bond between the most highly de- 
developed and the most lowly, which enables each 
to touch a base where consciousness is common to 
both, so that the soul can be, and is, conscious of 
the lowly vibrations of its sensuous body because 
of there being, from their common origin, some- 
thing in its higher development which recognizes 
this, for it is a portion of the consciousness of the 
lower. Were it not for this common basis in which 
all forms and differentiations of consciousness 
must root, entities at differing stages of their evo- 



10 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

lution would be absolutely cut off from all con- 
sciousness of other portions of trie universe. In- 
deed, man is now conscious of but that small por- 
tion which he has actually experienced, and by ex- 
perience evolved the latent potentiality of so doing 
into an active potency. For no manifesting entity 
possesses any state of consciousness which it has 
not evolved by actual experience in the Cycle of 
Necessity, or arena of evolution. Man knows and 
recognizes his material universe because, and only 
because, he has been that universe in all its myriad 
details. He has buried himself in its rocks, pulsa- 
ted with and in its rythmic oceans, felt the peace 
and strength of its mighty oaks, or he could not 
now be conscious that such things exist. 

While thought takes cognizance of these sense- 
impressions, it is not necessary to their existence, 
nor even to their recognition. The pure ecstasy 
arising out of the highest sense-consciousness ex- 
cludes thought entirely. Indeed, thought would 
only mar its perfectness. Who that has ever had 
his soul enwrapped in the tones of a perfect har- 
mony thought about, or tried to analyse, what was 
taking place? While it lasted time was not; 
thought had ceased its querulous interrogations, 
and the soul was content. It had no questionings, 
no doubts; it did not even "exist;" it was. 

Similarly, beautiful landscapes, the low, ceaseless 
murmur of the restless waves breaking upon the 
shore, the roar of the storm, the stillness after it 



SENSE-CONSCIOUSNESS 11 

has passed — all these things reach not the soul 
through the avenue of thought. They may evoke 
thought, but they are really a memory, a reminis- 
cense, of the soul, and penetrate it by means of the 
avenues of feeling. And, if perfect, they do not 
even evoke thought. Man does not have to reason 
with himself to know that he is happy; he does not 
even think of it until after the wave of perfect 
bliss has passed. 

The vibrations of seeing, hearing, tasting, and so 
on, roll in upon the soul and man becomes con- 
scious of them entirely independent of any think- 
ing process. He usually does connect them with 
thought, but the connection is not essential to their 
existence or recognition. It is largely due to the 
association of ideas. At the awakening of sensuous 
life in man at each birth his world is new and won- 
derful, and he is little else than an animated inter- 
rogation point — as all who have the care of child- 
ren will recognize. The habit so engendered be- 
comes despotic in its sway, and, indeed, nature in- 
tended this, so that, automatically and by the asso- 
ciation of ideas, his questioning analysis goes on 
long after perfect familiarity with any phenome- 
non has rendered this unnecessary. 

But the crowning proof that sense-consciousness 
is distinct from, and not dependent upon, thought is 
to be found in the animal kingdom. Here it is seen 
in all its purity and perfectness, although here it is 
already at work upon its Herculean task of evoking 



12 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

the latent power of thinking in a soul which is 
revelling only in the senses. The higher animals 
unquestionably think, but the star-fish as unques- 
tionably does not — its slow, laborious response to 
sense stimuli has not yet reached this plane of con- 
sciousness. But, natura non saltet, and we must not 
confound sense -consciousness with thought -coi> 
sciousness because the two glide imperceptibly into 
each other. And they are but two differentiations 
of the one great Primal Consciousness, just as the 
senses themselves are but lower differentiations of 
the one sense-consciousness. 

Sense-consciousness is thus seen to be the servant 
who prepares the way for thought — the pioneer who 
blazes out the pathways by which thought may 
guide its following footsteps. By its aid life be- 
comes a long panorama of nature-sights and sounds, 
every one of which thought must analyse and un- 
derstand. We may sit idly and drink in the sens- 
uous impressions, but in so doing we are only lag- 
gards on the way. We should understand the 
meaning, from its ethical aspect, of every one of 
these. It is not enough to classify and name, to 
seek for external differences and similarities; the 
inner meaning of it all must be sought out. Knowl- 
edge which does not broaden the human character 
and make it more humane or god-like is no knowl- 
edge — its acquirement is time thrown away. But 
nature is infinitely patient, and although we must 
get our lesson before this earth grows old and dies, 



DESIRE-CONSCIOUSNESSS 13 

to give place to newer and, let us hope, more perfect 
ones, still the interval is so long that there is ample 
opportunity, and none need fail because of lack of 
this. 

Sense-consciousnes is probably one of the lowest 
and most humble of all the divine differentiations 
within the sea of conscious life, for it is certainly 
one of the most transient. Yet, nevertheless, it is 
an absolutely necessary accessory to other and 
higher states, so that it will not do to pass it by 
too quickly. Let us rather learn its lessons, assist 
it to perform its duties, lean not upon its transient 
pleasures or the glimpse of life which it affords, but 
use it as a door through which we may enter the 
real college of life — as a preparatory department in 
the University of Being. 

DESIRE-CONSCIOUSNESS 

The consciousness of Desire is the natural se- 
quence of sensuous perception. When one sees a 
beautiful thing, for example, he desires to be like it 
— to be the same as it. This feeling his dimly 
awakened reason attempts to satisfy by the posses- 
sion of the thing physically. It is the craving for 
unity; the groping of the soul painfully and blind- 
ly its backward way across the abyss of differenti- 
ation over which it has passed. Similarly those 
desires whose office is to perpetuate life are at first 
related solely to that center of universal life which 



14 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

the man feels within his own breast. He is con- 
scious of no selfishness in desiring to live, so long 
as he has not separated his life from the infinite 
Whole. All desire is at its source pure and divine; 
it is differentiation and consequent further and 
further separation from its divine Source which 
permits of its becoming contaminated and tainted 
with selfishness. The purely divine desire to live 
thus becomes dulled, and for it is substituted the 
desire to live regardless of the rights of others, 
and, finally, the desire to live at the expense of 
others — the rast and most selfish stage. 

Yet a man does not necessarily associate thought 
with any of his desires. Memory and anticipation 
play a far more important part. One does not say, 
"I think that I want this thing," but, "I want it." 
Associated with thought through memory and im- 
agination, desire speedily falls under the sway of 
selfishness, thus acquiring a far higher potency; 
but it can not be said to be the offspring of thought. 
The desires are notoriously strongest where reason 
and its concomitant, will, are weakest. When we 
say that thought precedes desire, we often mean 
only that memory precedes desire, or that we desire 
a thing because memory, through the association of 
ideas, or in some other manner, has brought the 
thing before our minds. 

Desire is the motive for action on the part of all 
manifested life. Like all divine forces it is entirely 
impersonal and may be perverted into evil. The 



DESIRE-CONSCIOUSNESS 15 

devil is but God inverted, as the old saying tells us. 
In its highest aspect desire is but another name for 
compassion, for what is compassion but the desire 
to aid others? All the faculties of the lowliest, 
most fallen human soul have their roots in divinity 
— are but perversions through ignorance of the di- 
vinely beneficent forces of nature. Even the desires 
that seem — and are — most selfish are but the ef- 
forts of the soul to gain happiness through what 
seems to it the shortest method, and are due in the 
first instance entirely to ignorance. Ignorance of 
the meaning and purport of life; of the nature and 
essential divinity of the soul; of the universality of 
the law of cause and effect; of the fact of the re- 
peated return of the soul to the earth, the arena of 
its evolution — all this makes a sad chaos of life. 
No wonder that men commit the most horrible of 
crimes in their endeavor to reach and permanently 
possess happiness. Men murder, steal, forge, en- 
slave, form corporations and trusts, — commit all 
crimes — because their commission seems to bring 
happiness a step nearer. Truly, we need higher 
conceptions of both life and happiness! 



CHAPTER III 
THOUGHT AND IMAGINATION 

OPPOSITION is the law of differentiation, or 
rather, the means by which differentiation 
is accomplished. No force can be exerted 
except it be opposed by a counter force. The two 
may be disparate, the one yield to and be replaced 
by the other, but opposition of some degree is abso- 
lutely essential to the exhibition of energy. This 
being so — and its truth is self-evident — it follows 
that the manifestation of the faculties of the soul 
will tend to duality; there will be in each enough 
differentiation to afford the necessary basis for its 
activity. It may undoubtedly happen that one 
faculty finds the necessary opposing force at 
times in other faculties, as when reason opposes de- 
sire. But this outer opposition is not essential. 
Each faculty will be found to fall naturally into 
two great divisions which oppose each other suffi- 
ciently to afford the necessary energies to enable 
both portions to manifest and develope. Thought is 
no exception. In the Kosmos itself Primordial 
Thought divides into Absolute Wisdom, or the 
knowledge of worlds to be, and Creative Imagina- 
tion, or the power to clothe those Primal Ideas in 



THOUGHT AND IMAGINATION 17 

form. In the microcosm, or man, there is an exact 
parallel. Thought naturally divides itself into 
two great faculties — Reason and Imagination. The 
latter has never been accorded its proper place in 
the estimate of the faculties of the soul. The Sen- 
sational school of philosophers deal with it, strange 
to say, with more fairness and a more acute per- 
ception of its importance than any other class. 
They assign it creative functions, but assert that it 
can only use materials which have reached the 
mind through the senses — whence, in truth, they 
also derive all the faculties of the soul. They admit 
that the forms produced by the imagination are new, 
but not the material. Still, they see that the power 
to take even old material and work it up into some- 
thing quite new and unlike the old, is unique, and 
that, therefore, imagination, while employing mem- 
ory as its agent in gathering material, is much more 
than mere memory. 

It is, indeed. Few realize the tremendous power 
exercised in the idlest imaginings. Dream, for 
example, is a state where reason is notoriously in 
abeyance, often entirely absent, yet even the most 
foolish of dreams reproduce landscapes, persons, 
conversations, and so on, with a wealth of matter, 
and an accuracy of detail which is marvelous if 
philosophically examined. Memory may, and does, 
furnish much of the material for these idle visions, 
but this is simply because the soul is delighted 
with its sensuous existence, or with portions of it, 



18 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

at least, and deliberately reconstructs these by the 
magic power of its truly creative faculty. If it be 
discontented with its environments of any kind, 
physical, mental or moral, it will quietly discard or 
reject these, and construct for itself others brighter 
and better in which memory has little or no part. 

This universe is but the Imagination of God. 
Whatever part be played by reason in its begin- 
nings, imagination is the mighty agent which 
carves out every detail. And we can easily see 
that reason such as we know could well be absent 
from a process supervised by Absolute Wisdom. 
Imagination is the genii at whose touch form ap- 
pears. It is the opposite pole of thought, for 
thought and imagination are but the positive and 
negative aspects of one and the same thing. 
Thought deals with externals; imagination with 
interior things. Of course, reason also deals with 
internal things, as does also imagination with ex- 
ternals, but this is not the method ordinarily em- 
ployed. Imagination, in truth, is slowly changing 
the whole earth, and especially man himself, but 
molecular matter is unwieldy and needs a more 
powerful imagination than that of man to bring 
about speedy change. 

But we have every reason for supposing that 
finer states of matter are more easily affected. In- 
deed, there is no other way of accounting for the 
forms we see in dreams except to suppose them to 
have actually leaped into being, "full panoplied," 



THOUGHT AND IMAGINATION 19 

in response to our imagination, and to be con- 
structed out of matter in these rarer conditions. 
They persist only so long as our feeble wills hold 
them intact, even as the very universes will per- 
sist just so long as the mighty Creative Will of 
their Cosmocratores holds the idea of them clearly 
in its imagination, when they, too, will fade away 
like the vagaries of a departing dream. The " writ- 
ten upon the tablets of the brain " theory has long 
since been abandoned by thoughtful Sensational- 
ists, or Materialists, for they recognize the insuper- 
able mechanical difficulties which beset such an ex- 
planation. Idle dreams and equally idle fancies in 
waking are but the moods of a childish giant ; they 
presage the power which will be exerted when the 
giant realizes his strength and exerts it intelli- 
gently. 

Another thing to be remembered, and which will 
have a most important bearing upon the course of 
our future argument, is that the imagination is the 
subjective faculty of the soul, par excellence. Reason 
is its objective faculty, for it is so universally exer- 
cised upon external phenomena that it can scarcely 
be said to act interiorily, in the true sense of the 
term. But with imagination it is different. Its 
first step is to retire within; it can not be exer- 
cised while the mind is occupied with externals. 
For it no exterior universe is required, except to 
furnish material for its inner activity. In sleeping 
or waking, in night-dreaming or day, the external 



20 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

universe is unnecessary ; it creates its own worlds, 
and peoples them with its own beloved, utterly in- 
different as to whether external universes exist or 
not. 

Reason represents the working phase of exis- 
tence; imagination its opposite, or rest, and both 
are equally necessary to a happy existence. The 
law of cycles, of alternating activity and resting, is 
seen throughout all nature. Ever the night follows 
the day ; ever are the tired faculties of activity re- 
cuperated by the grateful cessation from toil. It is 
a law of life ; it is but another example of those 
"pairs of opposites" by which manifestation is 
accomplished, and through which existence wends 
its blissful way. There will never be that total 
cessation from toil which Western religions 
teach, nor is there warrant for this in all nature. 
"Work, then rest," is the command of nature, and 
it has been recognized, if but dimly, by every peo- 
ple who have set one day apart as sacred from toil. 

Imagination is a most perfect means of resting 
(for rest in its true sense is but a change of occupa- 
tion) inasmuch as it is above all limitations of 
time. When one retires into its recesses for pleas- 
sure, he cares not whether past, present or future 
be the subject-matter for its creations. Naturally, 
the young choose the future; equally naturally 
the old prefer to live in the past. When one sits 
down to rest in the fictions of today, does he not 
enter with an equal zest into the lives and loves of 



THOUGHT AND IMAGINATION 21 

the Antediluvians, the old Greeks and Romans, 
the ancient Britons, as with the fates of those of 
the present ? One rather prefers, if there be any 
choice, that a time be selected by the novelist which 
enables him to complete the picture presented, thus 
leaving no element of happiness to the uncertainty 
of the future. For uncertainty is the minor chord 
of our human existence both actually and music- 
ally. The real difference between minor and major 
music is unexplainable by the science of music 
alone. But psycho-physiology comes to its aid, 
and shows that the difference consists wholly in 
the sense of incompleteness and uncertainty which 
causes the feeling of sadness, and that this is due 
to the relation of the key-tone to the over-tones. 
In major music this is evident, and both har- 
mony and melody return to it as a base of support 
clearly defined and evident to the most untrained 
ear. In minor music this relation is concealed by 
the position of the key-note, which is neither prom- 
inent nor dominant. Therefore, there runs through 
it all a sense of incompleteness and uncertainty 
which causes the soul to feel that melancholy which 
must always attend it so long as it wanders in doubt 
and uncertainty. It may be, and is, sweet for it 
is buoyed by hope, but throughout is the wail of 
Demeter for Persephone. And the imagination is 
not bound to the rock of reality, as is reason. 
There need be no incompleteness nor uncertainty to 
its creations. Throughout the days of life one 



22 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

must toil with imperfection both within and with- 
out ; during sleep and death is restored the perfect 
and unconditioned, else would the heart get hard- 
ened and the hands grow weary 

Holding them up for their heritage. 

Excepting moments of sensuous enjoyment, the 
only rest the soul knows in waking life is found 
in the imagination. It constitutes the sole rest of 
the child who has not learned to live in the sen- 
suous and whose happy imaginings are but the fast 
disappearing vestiges of its blissful life beyond the 
grave. The boy soldier gets more true pleasure in 
the mock drill and the ragged attempt to imitate the 
uniform, than the real soldier does in all the glory 
of the actual battle. The child is yet living in its 
imagination, and the adult turns lovingly to the 
same source of happiness until he is taught by a 
false philosophy of life to seek happiness in the 
fleeting and equally unreal pleasures of sensuous 
enjoyment. 



CHAPTER IV 

THOUGHT, REASON, INTUITION, INSTINCT, AND FEELING 

IF we now examine thought, as thus analyzed, 
we will find much of the doubt and uncer- 
tainty which surrounded it capable of ex- 
planation. In its dual aspect, as we have seen, 
it is composed of reason and imagination, these 
being opposite poles of one and the same faculty, 
and each necessary to the activity and even exist- 
ence of the other. But thought is capable of still 
further analysis because of the fact that man is 
not identical with 3 nor the outcome of, the molecu- 
lar and chemical activities going on within his 
body, as our Materialistic philosophers would fain 
prove. That is to say, its effects are so different, 
accordingly as it occupies itself with high or low 
ideas or images, as to entitle it to a dual classifi- 
cation, as is the case also with the desires, which 
are beneficent or maleficent accordingly as they 
are directed to high or low things. 

Again, if we would regard the mind as only one 
of many faculties of the soul, and the brain-mind 
as only a semi-material organ, just as the eye and 
ear are purely material organs, much of the per- 
plexity as to what happens to the soul at death 



24 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

would be relieved. Just as the eye, ear, and so on, 
are organs which relate the soul to molecular vibra- 
tions upon this, the molecular, plane, so the brain- 
mind is but a superior kind of organ to enable the 
soul to synthesize all the various reports conveyed 
to it by the senses, and to reason out the relation 
which one bears to another. We over-estimate its 
importance, and imagine that the brain-mind is 
our very life because its bombardment by the 
senses is so incessant, and its response thereto so 
prompt. It is as though one were to assume the 
superintendence of a vast, rapidly revolving ma- 
chine which demanded his entire attention. He 
would have to merge his consciousness entirely in 
the work which it did, and for him, while so in- 
tently occupied, the rest of the world would be 
non-existent. Now, sight alone bombards the 
senses with many trillions of vibrations per second 
for the violet ray alone, while if we include the 
whole spectrum, whose united effect is light, the 
number of vibrations exceeds all comprehension. 
Add to this, that all these vibrations reveal to the 
delighted soul an ever-changing panorama of 
beauty — an almost infinite Aladdin's Palace — and 
it is easy to perceive that it can not but be over- 
whelmed by the senses, and entirely over-esti- 
mate the importance of sensuous life. Sen- 
suous life consists almost wholly of thoughts and 
images aroused by the senses, and gloated over, so 
to speak, by the brain-mind without even an at- 



REASON AND INSTINCT 25 

tempt being made to properly exercise the reason- 
ing power of the soul upon them. The Sensualists 
are not wholly un philosophical, but they mistake 
the part for the whole. 

As we retreat inward we may, perhaps, reach a 
point where reason and imagination, as we know 
them, are one. We can well fancy creative imag- 
ination and divine intelligence, or reason, to be 
united in unmanifested deity. But in man they 
are in manifestation, and therefore opposed. For 
without opposition there can be no manifestation, 
as we have seen. They relieve one another, so to 
say, in the eternal cycle of life. When the one is 
most active the other is in abeyance. Both afford 
the very highest states of bliss. But reason offers 
no higher happiness than the imagination. Cre- 
ative imagination even when dulled and materi- 
alized brings a happiness, as in the case of the poet 
or painter, which is akin to ecstacy. What must it 
be, then, when one has but to will, and see his 
images spring forth in all the glorious beauty of a 
primal birth ? 

Reason, indeed, might be said to mar the highest 
bliss, even as would the conscious exercise of the 
imagination. There must be no sense of effort in 
our happiness, or the soul will sooner or later tire. 

Reason passes without any perceptible break into 
instinct, below, and intuition, above. Studied by 
the light of these relations, its function and office 
in the economy of the soul become still more ap- 



26 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

parent. Both instinct and intuition are relatively- 
much nearer the divine than is reason ; each fuses 
into and becomes indistinguishable from the other 
under certain conditions. Instinct is intelligent 
change of relations, unaccompanied by self-con- 
sciousness, or the intervention of reason, and reaches 
down into atomic and molecular activities, upon the 
one hand, and upward into the semi-self-conscious 
response to necessities of environment, upon the 
other. Intuition is more difficult to describe be- 
cause it transcends the present normal state of con- 
sciousness for man ; yet it represents the same cer- 
tainty of knowing, without the possibility of err- 
ing or the necessity of reasoning, upon mental 
planes, that instinct displays in action among ma- 
terial environments. 

As said, reason merges into intuition above, and 
into instinct below, as it must do if consciousness 
be unity in source and essence. In its own domain 
proper, reason is but the process of comparison be- 
tween things, with conclusions drawn therefrom. 
It is said to be the crown of man ; it is rather the 
collar of the serf. It is the sign of imperfection; 
the acknowledgment of ignorance. It is the grop- 
ing of a blind Sampson among the pillars of a ma- 
terial prison, and is often as destructive when it 
puts forth its strength. Except the real nature and 
essence of the things which it compares be known, 
its deductions must often, perhaps always, err. 

The presence of reason in the universe would 



REASON AND INSTINCT 27 

seem to indicate that the Absolute itself is capable 
of change ; of having the sum of its conscious ex- 
periences added to, and a widening of its conscious 
area in consequence. For if the universe exists by 
virtue of the Absolute, then either man, with his 
experiences of hopes and fears, his sufferings and 
bliss, is a part of and due to the action of this Ab- 
solute, or he is apart from it, and but an evanes- 
cent will-o'-the-wisp, resulting from chance com- 
binations in the elements out of which nature con- 
structs her eternal verities. But man can unques- 
tionably uncover depths in his own consciousness 
which link him to and make him an essential fac- 
tor in, the cosmos in which he apparently awakens 
to being ; therefore, within him is acting an actual 
portion of the Absolute ; and as he is continuously 
undergoing new conscious experiences, the Absolute 
is also doing this by means of him, its representa- 
tive and agent. The infinite unity of the Ab- 
solute can only manifest itself finitely by means of 
an infinite succession of finite phenomena ; so that 
unless nature be postulated as a weary treadmill 
where the same experiences are, after ages have 
cycled by, gone through with again, there must be 
recognized the possibility of an infinite number of 
new experiences. Mathematics hints at the same 
thing in demonstrating that an infinite number of 
atoms require infinite time for their infinite permu- 
tations. 

Self-consciousness accompanies and distinguishes 



28 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

reason. For illusion is the producer of self-con- 
sciousness, and within its grasp the N soul must 
grope. Reason represents consciousness so blinded 
by matter that it believes itself separate from the 
great Whole ; upon which erroneous conception the 
entire structure of personal self-consciousness is 
reared. Failing to recognize that the Self is the 
same in all, but perceiving its glimmer among the 
clouds of its material encasement, it proceeds to 
erect an impassable, if wholly imaginary, barrier 
between that light of consciousness within itself 
and the same light illumining the (to it) outer cos- 
mos. This basic error well illustrates its nature 
and its province. It is the servant of pure .con- 
sciousness ; the hardy and fearless explorer of those 
unknown abysses, those dreamed-of but unattained 
powers which must continually arise in the infinite 
changes of an illimitable, resistlessly progressing 
Universe. It is the pioneer ; the explorer ; and as 
heedless of peril as pioneers ought to be. It blazes 
out the rude path which intuition transforms into 
the broad highway. With infinite patience it 
changes chaos into cosmos, and is rewarded by be- 
ing itself transformed into intuition in the process. 
So that reason represents divine consciousness 
struggling with that infinitely new succession of 
phenomena which the manifestation of changing 
universes implies and necessitates. Dealing with 
the eternally new and unfamiliar, it is for this 
reason uninformed and fallible; it ought there- 



REASON AND INSTINCT 29 

fore, to be cautious. It is divine in that it rep- 
resents the divine potentiality of consciousness in 
grappling with and mastering new problems. 

Instinct is creative imagination impressed upon 
plastic, obedient, unreasoning substance ; therefore, 
the latter plays its part blindly and well. Yet, as 
this impress is also an emanation, reason is bound 
to be born from the seed so implanted, and it ap- 
pears as feeble, yet as full of promise, as a child. 
Its first concepts are as those of a child ; it makes 
mistakes, commits errors, falls under the sway of 
illusion, but, because of its oneness in essence, it 
finally wins its way back to its divine Source ; its 
new experiences, ripened into intuition, are added 
to the stores of Absolute Wisdom. 

Reason, therefore, must be assigned its proper 
value in the study of consciousness. It is not the 
supreme and only arbiter, as modern thought would 
teach. This function has been assigned it through 
the glamour of its own illusions. It is invaluable 
as a servant ; it is but a blind master. While 
groping in the bonds of matter, man must perforce 
trust it ; but he should know its weakness, recog- 
nize that its conclusions are finite, founded upon 
imperfect knowledge, and liable to be set aside at 
any time by larger experience. And he ought ever 
to seek for the light of intuition which glows within 
his heart, and foster, encourage, and wholly trust 
it, for it is the lord, and reason but its humble 
vassal. Then slowly the recognition of the divine 



30 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

man within will dawn ; his divine powers will be- 
gin to function; and reason, controlled and di- 
rected, will prove of a thousandfold more service 
than when it ignorantly claims the throne of the 
true man. 

Yet reason will always be. There must ever 
arise new conditions, new states of consciousness ; 
for the great heart of nature can not cease to beat, 
nor the universes die. And with these, as we have 
seen, it must always be its province to grapple ; so 
that before it is the priceless promise of endless 
employment ; a future which can never weary nor 
grow commonplace. 

Intuition again, is usually described as that fac- 
ulty of the soul by means of which it cognizes truth 
directly. Yet while the soul undoubtedly possesses 
this faculty by virtue of its divine origin, it is only 
as a potentiality until further developed by its ex- 
pansion through conscious experience. Intuition is 
stored knowledge, the memory of which the soul 
can draw upon ; it is also the perfection of reason- 
ing processes which go in a flash from the known to 
the unknown ; it is the ideation of the Higher Ego 
— the Divine Soul which informs body after body, 
and which is untouched by either birth or death. 
For intuition is utterly inexplicable except by 
the light of reincarnation. Admitting — which is 
but the truth — that the soul lives life after life, re- 
taining the aroma, so to say, of its conscious ex- 
periences, then intuition is seen to be but the con- 



REASON AND INSTINCT 31 

servation of consciousness — the expansion, through 
infinite conscious experience of the finite I am I 
into the infinite I AM ! 

Instinct is its counterpart in the animal king- 
dom, but here the conservation would seem to be 
hierarchal — as, indeed, it may be in man, in some 
great Oversoul, which we can dimly sense, but can 
not yet clearly perceive. Instinct seems to be 
hierarchal because each member of any particular 
family possesses all the conscious power that any 
other individual has. One bird builds its nest just 
as perfectly as another of the same species, 
with only the slightest of divergings. Imper- 
ceptible as are these differences, they are yet in 
this kingdom the point of unstable equilibrium, 
where the ascent of life is actually taking place, 
and constitute the only mark by which we are sure 
that instinct is not a fixed quantity and, therefore, 
evolution not a dream, and the Cycle of Necessity 
a fable and an illusion. So, intuition also marks 
the point of unstable equilibrium for the soul — the 
conserved faculties of the divine man, the Ishvara 
who "dwells in every human heart. " It is admit- 
tedly greater in some than in others ; in many it 
seems entirely absent, while not a few men show 
very clear traces of being still under the dom- 
inance of instinct — at such infinitely varying 
stages of evolution have the different members 
of the human race arrived ! 

Of the faculty of feeling little can be said. Feel- 



32 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

ing is consciousness; to analyze it is to explain 
the mystery of life, to answer the riddle of the 
Sphynx. It is the synthesis of all the various fac- 
ulties of the soul. All alike root in it at their last 
analysis. The consciousness of life is a feeling at 
its base; the consciousness that we are alive, or 
self-consciousness, is no less a feeling. To feel is 
to know, to be conscious. 

Yet as the faculties of man run the entire gamut, 
from the lowest to the highest and most divine, so 
do the feelings naturally divide into those of the 
lower and those of the higher man. The former 
we speak of as " emotions, " although the latter are 
often, but wrongly, included in this designation. 
Properly speaking, the emotions are those which 
appertain strictly to sensuous experiences, while 
the truer, deeper feelings, such as pity, compassion, 
love, hope, and so on, belong to the higher nature 
entirely. Not but that these may be evolved — 
perhaps liberated would be a better word — by 
and through sensuous experiences, for sensuous ex- 
perience is the schoolhouse of the soul, but being 
once evolved they are naturally conserved by the 
real, and not by the transient, man. We see, 
indeed, the germs of compassion — not to be con- 
fused with the animal maternal instinct — in many 
animals, but this only shows the common base of 
all consciousness, the unity of life on all planes. 

The opposite of feeling is, of course, matter, 
feeling being only a synonym for consciousness, or 



REASON AND INSTINCT 33 

spirit. Yet matter is only embodied entities 
whose consciousness is so different from our own 
that to us it seems non-consciousness, so that spirit 
and matter again are shown to be only opposite 
poles of the same thing. Certainly, in the deeper 
feelings, we are in the land of divinity, and far be- 
yond our ability to analyze. We may not ques- 
tion ; we can only accept and bow before the 
mighty mystery of life. 



CHAPTER V 
EFFECT OF DEATH UPON THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF LIFE 

HAVING briefly studied the nature of the 
chief faculties of the soul, it remains to 
examine by the light of reason and logic 
the effect upon them of the death of the physical 
body. 

At the very outset, the query meets us : Is con- 
sciousness annihilated absolutely by death, or does 
some portion of it escape this fate? And, if so, 
what portion? 

Consciousness implies a cognizer, the thing cog- 
nized, and the act of consciousness itself. That 
which is conscious of life, in the case of primal, 
basic, life-consciousness, may be termed the first 
Manifested Logos, or Infinite Unity, which, being 
infinite, is certainly capable of manifesting itself in 
an infinite number of centers of consciousness, upon 
an infinite number of planes of consciousness and 
during an infinite succession of units of time. The 
thing of which it is conscious is motion — Infinite, 
Absolute, Motion — which is the material aspect of 
Itself. The act of consciousness is that Infinite 
Volition by which it eternally cognizes its own 
Being. 



DEATH AND LIFE-CONSCIOUSNESS 35 

Motion is the material manifestation of life; 
recognition of that motion, the spiritual manifesta- 
tion, or conscious aspect of life. A body in which 
motion ceases as a whole is dead as an inde- 
pendent body, although its constituent parts may 
be in violent motion. Thus we say the moon is 
dead because it has ceased to exhibit the two 
forms of motion by means of which we recognize 
planetary life — independent motion about its own 
axis, and independent orbital motion about the 
sun. Especially is the revolution upon its own 
axis evidence of volition in a planetary body, for 
it is a motion which astronomers have exhausted 
all possible theories in a vain attempt to explain. 
However satisfactorily their celestial mechanics may 
account for other motions, in the face of axial revo- 
lution they break hopelessly down. The moon, it 
is true, has an axial motion of twenty-eight days, 
but this is due to the attraction of the earth alone, 
and is in no sense volitional. For moons, earths, 
and suns revolve upon their own axes because they 
will * to do so — a fact which astronomy will be 
driven to accept ere long. 

Absence of all motion is not only impossible, 
but inconceivable. A meaningless, senseless mo- 
tion is unthinkable in an orderly cosmos. The 
effect can not be greater than the cause, and 



* That is, their Regents will to do this. The material molecules of 
their bodies no more will to act than do those of the body of man. 
In both cases it is the Regent, or soul. 



36 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

if we find order and plan at the periphery of being, 
we may be assured it exists at its center. There- 
fore, Absolute Motion is both planned and cog- 
nized by Absolute Wisdom, or Absolute Conscious- 
ness, and for this reason, the consciousness of life 
is infinite in both space and time. 

The consciousness of life, then, pervades all space. 
It is the base, apparently, upon which all other 
states of consciousness rest, the source from which 
they spring. It is as incapable of annihilation as 
space itself. It is even independent of form, for it 
can equally well exist in the Formless. Therefore, 
death or the destruction of form can not de- 
stroy or annihilate the consciousness of life, or of 
being. But with this consciousness of existence in 
the human soul, is associated the added conscious- 
ness that I exist — I, a particular individual, a 
self-cognizing entity. Is this individualized con- 
sciousness annihilated at death ? 

This I-am-myself consciousness does seem to de- 
pend upon form. It is a differentiation which has 
arisen within the universe of life, and is a fact 
which must be recognized and explained — not 
blinked. 

The I, or ego-consciousness, roots in the very Ab- 
solute itself. It is primal ; it precedes and deter- 
mines all subsequent evolution. From I-centers 
of consciousness must proceed that Infinite Ideation 
whose wisdom results in cosmos. To such I- 
centers must run all the reports, so to speak, of the 



DEATH AND LIFE-CONSCIOUSNESS 37 

cosmic senses. It is possible, as we have seen, for 
the Absolute to manifest itself as an I at any 
point in space or time — a confused comprehension 
of which lies at the base of the Deism of Hegel. 
From these primal I-centers spring the I-am- 
myself — a reflected state of consciousness caused 
by embodiment in material forms. This manifes- 
tation of Divinity as a human soul, or self-recog- 
nizing center of consciousness, is the most wonder- 
ful of all the dark mysteries of Being. 

For in the human soul consciousness separates 
itself from the universe of which it is a portion, and 
then proceeds to study and analyse that other por- 
tion which is really itself, but from which it is ap- 
parently divided. But to separate itself, even ap- 
parently, requires a material basis, as the Secret 
Doctrine points out, and any thing material must 
have form, though this be but that Primeval Chaos 
of which all olden philosophies speak. So that 
Form becomes a sine qua non of all soul manifesta- 
tion. 

It will be evident upon a moment's examination 
that this I-am-I which is at the base of the human 
soul does not depend for its existence upon the an- 
imal form of its body, however strange this asser- 
tion may seem to Western ears. But if it did, then 
would the sense of I-am-ness change with the 
changing body, which is never for any two consecu- 
tive moments precisely the same. The most radi- 
cal and complete changes, as between the infant 



38 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

and the old man, are all accompanied by the same 
sense of I-am-myself. One may feel that that self 
has had many experiences ; that its opinions and 
beliefs have undergone many changes, but the 
inner feeling that I am experiencing this, or chang- 
ing my views into these or those, is always the 
same. From the cradle . to the grave, throughout 
infancy, childhood, adult life, and old age, the I 
has remained untouched by all the panorama 
which has passed before it. Character may change 
— it is the object of the ages and of evolution to 
change it — but that which recognizes itself as I 
never changes. The form which reflects the cosmic 
I am, and causes the feeling of ego-hood in the hu- 
man soul, is not that of its animal body, of this we 
may be assured. It is permanent ; it is, perhaps, 
the noumenon of form, and capable of manifesting 
in any form, whatsoever. 

But the soul, or I-am-myself, does depend upon 
its physical form for bringing it into relationship 
with this molecular plane, which is done through 
and by means of the senses. Without physical or- 
gans for receiving and transmitting vibrations the 
physical universe would be non-existent for it. It 
sits within, occupying a plane of the universe more 
stable than this molecular one, and receives the 
reports of the senses, almost exactly as a telegraph 
operator might receive reports of the doings of dis- 
tant cities. It is evident that if the wires were cut 
the operator would be unable to communicate with 



DEATH AND LIFE-CONSCIOUSNESS 39 

those distant places, and it is also true that death 
must cut off all communication with this molecular 
plane, for the nerve-wires are completely destroyed 
by death. 

This is the first and most important of the truths 
to learn from the death of the body — that it separ- 
ates the soul effectually from this molecular world. 
It will throw a broad and bright light upon all so- 
called communications with the dead. It is possi- 
ble to reach the dead, or, what is the same thing, 
for the dead to communicate with us, but it is the 
rare exception, and not the rule. A number of 
abnormal or unusual conditions must exist, which 
will be studied when dealing with this subject, 
in another chapter. It is enough for our present 
purpose to point out that the physical senses re- 
quire physical peripheral cells to receive the im- 
pact of the vibrations coming from our physical 
universe, physical nerves and nerve fluids to con- 
vey these vibrations to the sense-centers, and physi- 
cal cells to receive, record and preserve them until 
the inner ego can take cognizance of them. Death 
completely breaks this necessary sequence, and 
even sleep does so temporarily. Jndeed, the latest, 
and probably correct, theory of the modus operan- 
dum of sleep supposes the actual physical inter- 
ruption of this sequence by the separating, or 
mutual withdrawing, of the central nerve cells 
which are in contact when the ego is awake. 

Sleep is the exact counterpart of death in that it 



40 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

cuts off the soul from communication with the ex- 
ternal universe. To all intents and purposes, a 
man asleep is a man dead, the sole difference being 
in the power that the living man has to awaken. 
Let the sleep be profound enough, and the dulled 
senses convey no reports whatsoever to the sleeper. 
" Seeing, and hearing and feeling are done," for him 
who slumbers, until he again awakens. Sleep has 
been too little studied ; within its blank lapses of 
consciousness may be found the most instructive 
and helpful analogies with death, did we but exam- 
ine them in the proper spirit. For in sleep the 
body is exhausted temporarily ; in death it is out- 
worn altogether. The soul rests its body ten- 
thousand times, but at last must lay it aside en- 
tirely, so that death is but a longer, more profound 
sleep. One is dead when asleep, and but asleep 
when dead. 

Similarly, trance, unconsciousness from concus- 
sion, fainting, etc., all throw the light of analogy 
upon their great congener, death. The writer once 
questioned a particularly intelligent young man, 
dying from traumatic peritonitis, and in full pos- 
session of all his faculties, as to the nature of the 
sensation of dying. " I feel exactly as if I were go- 
ing to faint," was the reply. And presently he did 
faint — into a swoon that will last him a thousand 
years, it may be. Had he awakened, by any 
chance, in his old body, he would have picked up 
from the record upon the brain cell the thread of 



DEATH AND LIFE-CONSCIOUSNESS 41 

this life, and gone on ; when he awakens in a new 
one, he will have to renew all his associations with 
this molecular universe, and again go through the 
slow process of building for himself a habitation. 
However complete and unbroken may be the web 
of life upon deeper planes in which the soul has its 
true home, the interregnum between earth lives is 
as real as a chasm between precipices, and can only 
be bridged by uniting the consciousness and mem- 
ory of the soul while in the body to that inner 
thread upon which all its molecular and transient 
personalities are strung. 

For the body is not the home of the soul, how- 
ever much it may appear to be. It is a continual 
struggle for it to maintain itself here, and the 
slightest break in the channels by means of which 
it reaches the earth is sufficient to annul all con- 
sciousness of earth-life and its concerns. Fatigue 
wearies the delicate wires daily, and the soul 
is compelled to relax its hold and to abandon, if 
but temporarily, its communication with earth. 
Sleep the brain must, or madness and death will 
quickly follow. Disease, accident — ten thousand 
things — surround the soul's avenues to this molec- 
ular universe, and all seeking to exclude it from 
this, to it, abnormal consciousness, either tempo- 
rarily, by sleep, delirium, or trance, or to destroy 
these approaches permanently by death. 

So that there can be nothing in the casting off of 
the physical body to warrant the apprehension that 



42 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

the I-am-myself consciousness will not survive the 
process. If it be, as it unquestionably is, independ- 
ent of all change in the body ; if it is unaltered by 
growth or age ; if it remain the same when paralysis 
removes all knowledge or sensation of almost the 
whole of its habitation; if it survive the inter- 
regnums of sleep, delirium, trance or madness, dur- 
ing which the body is for it, at least temporarily, 
annihilated, then there can be no reason for alleg- 
ing that death destroys or even changes this primal, 
individualizing and permanent consciousness of 
I AM MYSELF! 



CHAPTER VI 

EFFECT OF DEATH UPON THE SENSES 

THE sense-organs are in the material body ; no 
one will dispute this fact. Indeed, the body 
is but a congeries of sense-organs, together 
with the various accessory systems for maintaining 
these in a serviceable condition, for receiving their 
reports, for locomotion, reproduction of other 
bodies, etc. Death unquestionably destroys these 
organs, and so cuts off all the avenues by which 
the vibrations of this molecular plane of the uni- 
verse reach the soul. There can be no seeing, hear- 
ing, tasting, touching, or smelling of molecular 
things after the death of the body. And, indeed, 
unless we assume a sensuous state of existence be- 
yond the grave, such as the Christian heaven or the 
Moslem paradise, there is no further use for these. 
The senses are indubitably differentiations of a di- 
vine sense-consciousness, which is one of the native 
faculties of the soul. They enable the soul to 
perceive and examine any exterior plane. The dif- 
ferent methods by which matter may be approached 
and its various qualities and properties recognized, 
cause the differentiations of the one sense-conscious- 
ness into the so-called different senses. 



44 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

These have been differentiated upon the molecu- 
lar plane to meet its necessities. When the soul in 
its journey through the great Cycle of Necessity, 
finds itself face to face with any new plane of mat- 
ter, it must and will meet the new conditions by 
constructing new sense-organs. It is said that the 
astral plane lies next in our pathway, and that we 
are already beginning to develope the necessary 
senses to enable the soul to contact it, and that this 
is the secret of the abnormal powers of mediums 
and psychics. Whether this be true or not, matters 
little to our present enquiry ; the sense organs which 
we have evolved, and which we are beginning (very 
imperfectly) to use^ are unquestionably destroyed 
by death, and with them all possibility of sensuous 
perception of the molecular earth. This is the all- 
important fact for our purpose. We are not even 
concerned as to whether or not disembodied souls 
can use the remnants of their physical sense-organs, 
or embryotic astral ones, for bringing them into 
sensuous contact with the astral plane ; it is suffi- 
cient to know that the physical organs are de- 
stroyed, and that with their destruction all power 
of sensuous contact with the earth is gone. 
Whether or not other methods of communication 
are available will be discussed in its proper place. 

Centers of sensation certainly exist in an inte- 
rior and comparatively permanent vesture of the 
soul after the destruction of the body, but they are 
as useless for sensuous perception of the earth as 



DEATH AND THE SENSES 45 

telegraph stations whose wires have been cut, are 
for communicating with distant places. No doubt 
the soul, through sheer force of habit, fancies it 
sees, hears, and tastes, upon the astral plane after it 
leaves the body, just as while in the body it often 
fancies it feels an amputated limb. But it is noth- 
ing more than the association of ideas acting under 
the force of habit, in the former case, and the 
pinching by the cicatrix of the amputated nerve- 
ends, in the latter, which nerve-ends, again through 
habit, refer the sensation to a non-existent periph- 
eral distribution. 

There seems no escape from the fact, therefore, 
that sensuous perception ceases with the death of 
the body, and that whatever is preserved of the 
faculties of the soul, this does not follow man 
beyond the grave. It is small wonder, in view of 
this, that death seems such utter annihilation, for 
our earth-lives are almost entirely based upon the 
reports of our senses. For the average person life 
consists in what he sees and hears, together with 
utterly chaotic and useless speculations and fancies 
induced thereby. The average man imagines that 
he thinks, but. he only, idly and vacuously, re- 
thinks the thoughts of the very few who really do 
think. Deprive him of all sensuous contact with 
external things, and his sole recourse for thought 
or imagination would lie in his memory of what he 
had seen or heard, and when this failed or became 
out-worn, insanity or idiocy must result. This 



46 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

has been too often proven in the cases of those only 
partially deprived of new sensuous association by 
solitary confinement. Yet the ordinary man fan- 
cies that he has had sufficient experiences during 
the few years of his sensuous life to occupy his 
mind throughout the eternities of the future heav- 
en which he ignorantly hopes to attain. There 
must be a more stable foundation laid for eternity 
than in mere sensuous experiences, or in the 
thoughts arising therefrom, if the Pilgrim through 
the Cycle of Necessity ever reaches such a condition 
of consciousness — which is exceedingly improb- 
able. Meanwhile, let us be content with the cy- 
cles of rest following upon those of activity which 
nature has so kindly and considerately provided 
for our weaknesses and our scanty intellectual ac- 
cumulations during any one of our many lives in 
the embodied state. 

Most theories of the after-death states which pre- 
vail in the West, and which are not Christian, 
suppose everlastingly new experiences. In other 
words, the traveller through the great Cycle of Ne- 
cessity is hurried from experience to experience, 
without having the necessary time to find out the 
meaning of any of them, or, in fact, to really ob- 
serve any of them. He is in even a worse condition 
than a passenger in one of our modern railway 
coaches. The latter is hurried through a whirling 
panorama of moving plain, forest, farm or city, 
travelling both day and night, until he arrives at 



DEATH AND THE SENSES 47 

his journey's end. If the object be to simply get 
there in the shortest possible time, it is accom- 
plished, but if it be to observe and study the nature 
and capacities of the country through which he 
hurries, it is not. Similarly, if the Pilgrim through 
the Cycle of Necessity had only to hurry to the 
end, the rushing from this to new experiences upon 
some other world would quickest accomplish his 
object. But such is evidently not nature's purpose. 
She is infinitely patient — as she is infinite in all 
other aspects, if we but recognize this fact. She af- 
fords us almost endless opportunities, but she is a 
rigidly exacting teacher, and will accept no half- 
learned lessons. That which has been conceived 
in the great, Infinite Mind will some day be accom- 
plished, though time which we might conceive of as 
eternity be occupied in the task. If she desires to 
produce an eagle to wing his way through the ether, 
she may not — and does not — fashion him out of 
clay, a feathery Adam, and launch him in the 
skies. She takes a single cell, and begins a patient 
evolution from within without, slowly molding the 
potential thought into the potent form until the 
eagle appears, though long ages may have been 
consumed in the process, and the eagle for weary 
eons a creeping reptile before he at last leaves the 
earth for the sky. So there is no warrant in all or 
any of nature's processes for supposing that this 
earth, which is evidently the schoolhouse of the 
soul, is visited but once by its pupil, and then 



48 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

abandoned eternally in order to enter new fields of 
unexplored phenomena, through which it is equally 
hurried on in that which would then be its mad 
rush through the Cycle of Being. 

Sensuous perception is the alphabet only, in the 
great curriculum which reveals to the soul the mys- 
teries of its own being. It is but reasonable to sup- 
pose that once learned thoroughly it will be laid 
aside or relegated to the necessary but unimport- 
ant position of all alphabets in the subsequent pur- 
suit of knowledge. Nature would become infinitely 
wearisome did not her object-lessons present in- 
finite variety. We do sometimes weary of sense- 
life, but only because we linger unnecessarily long 
over our tasks. However, it is evidently not the 
object of nature to keep us eternally employed in 
learning her sensuous alphabet. Only the very 
rim — the outermost portion of being — can be per- 
ceived by means of the sense-organs. We may 
smell, taste, see, hear, and touch the material en- 
velope of things, but if we do not evolve the power 
to perceive and comprehend the essence or spirit, 
we can never really progress. This, nature is con- 
tinually pointing out. She tempts us on by means 
of sensuous perception, but it is only that we may 
enter the path of attainment. She bombards us 
through the senses in order to compel us to think ; 
she surrounds us with hostile forces to evoke our 
powers of resistance. She continuously removes 
the possibility of sensuous perception by sleep and 



DEATH AND THE SENSES 49 

death to enforce upon our understandings the truth 
that sensuous life is not essential to the existence of 
the soul, but is only a temporary aid for pupils in 
her primary department. 

There is another office of the senses which must 
not be overlooked, if we would rightly estimate 
their place and function in the development of the 
faculties of the soul and the economy of being. 
They supply the resisting force which enables the 
true faculties of the soul to evolve. As we have 
seen, any force must have a counter force or it be- 
comes non-existent. So that the senses directly 
oppose themselves to the progress of the soul in 
this stage of its evolution. They demand that it 
shall cease to struggle on ; that it shall abide with 
them. This fact is the reason for the recognition 
of two souls which Goethe found warring within 
his breast; for the spiritual man and the man of 
earth which St. Paul found opposing each other 
even unto death ; it is the key to the statement in 
the Book of the Golden Precepts that "the Self of 
matter and the Self of spirit can never meet ; one 
of the twain must disappear ; there is no room for 
both." The opposition, the allurements, the be- 
guilings, the temptations, of the senses, are wise, 
beneficent, and wholly for the soul's good. Nature 
may seem to lay snares for our feet, but she does it 
to teach us caution; she tempts us to make us 
strong; she adjusts the effects to the foolish and 
wicked causes which we set up to teach us wisdom. 



50 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

Experience is the great Teacher, and errors and 
mistakes — aye, sins and vices — constitute her 
most effectual object-lessons. If earth were a place 
free from sensuous temptation and sin, the soul 
would leave it no wiser than when it came. 

The recognition of the fact that the senses di- 
rectly oppose the progress of the soul, and this in 
its own best interests, throws a flood of light upon 
the problem of being. If we are living in the 
senses alone, we may know that we are making no 
progress, but rather retrograding — as we undoubt- 
edly are, if we permit them to tempt us into com- 
mitting sin and vice. They are the trainers of the 
soul, and if they do not buffet and tyrannize over 
it — do not oppose strength against strength — they 
fail to call out the highest of which the soul is cap- 
able. The greater the temptation, the greater the 
opportunity to overcome ; the stronger the enemy, 
the greater the credit for the victory. But we must 
face the fact, too, that the soul may lose in the 
contest. There would be no merit in fighting a 
battle where victory was pre-ordained, where the 
soul could not but win. The senses are the devils 
of all religions, the tempters in every soul-myth. 

We think the senses are our friends; , they are, in 
the experiences which they afford the soul, and in 
the opportunities for the development of strength 
which the struggle with them offers, but they be- 
come our deadly enemies unless we conquer and 
dominate them. Against their giant might the 



DEATH AND THE SENSES 51 

soul struggles for eons, until at length it becomes, 
because of the struggle, a still stronger giant, and 
so conquers in the feud of the ages. Then will the 
soul be glad that it had such opportunities, as it 
turns from this conquered foe to other and inner 
worlds which it would perhaps have never dared to 
attempt had it not the discipline and strength 
growing out of its long battlings with the senses. 

Since the senses directly oppose the soul, and 
since nature always ensures the opportunity to rest 
after any struggle, it is but fitting, and a portion of 
her great plan, that these should be laid aside 
at death. It is but the tired warrior unbuckling 
his sword after the day's battle that his rest may be 
undisturbed. Similarly, the senses would mar and 
make imperfect the rest after the battle of life, and 
the soul willingly lays them aside during the truce 
of death, even if it must again gird them on during 
its next struggle with the temptations of earthly 
existence. It is one of the wisest provisions in all 
the compassionate plan of nature that the deafen- 
ing roar of the senses should not be heard during 
the rest beyond the grave. 



CHAPTER VII 

EFFECT OF DEATH UPON THE DESIRE-CONSCIOUSNESS 

DESIRE of some nature would seem to be at the 
basis of all manifestation. It is as univer- 
sal, as omnipresent, as the consciousness of 
life itself. It cannot be destroyed. Like all forms of 
force it may be changed into other expressions, but 
that which reappears must be the exact equivalent 
of that which disappeared ; it is under, and exemp- 
lifies, the law of the conservation of force and the 
correlation of energy. The object of desire may be 
changed ; one may transmute, by hard and long- 
continued effort, his selfish into unselfish desires, 
but the force will not be lessened. On the con- 
trary, it will be apparently increased, for selfish 
desire stands alone and is inharmonic ; while when 
unselfish it tends to become harmonic and cosmic; 
the entity draws upon and becomes in desire one 
with the great, infinite source of all desire and ex- 
hibits all the desire-force that its organism per- 
mits. 

It follows, then, that desire persists beyond the 
grave, and we must endeavor, by analogy and 
logical inference, to determine its nature, mode of 



DEATH AND DESIRE-CONSCIOUSNESS 53 

manifestation, and vehicle. We have seen * that it 
is impossible to deprive the soul of a material body, 
even though this be as tenuous as space itself, 
and that there can be no reason for doubting that 
when the physical is thrown off, the soul is still 
clothed with an inner and more ethereal form. But 
we may go still farther with our reasoning, and de- 
clare that inasmuch as the physical body is un- 
doubtedly the result of thought, and may be, and is, 
changed at all times under the force of thought, 
this inner body is also thought-constructed. More 
than this ; by the facility with which this inner 
matter takes form under the chaotic stimulus of 
dream, we have every reason for believing that the 
soul instantly constructs for itself, under the stress 
of its desire to live, a body in every respect resem- 
bling in form and appearance that which is out- 
worn. Reason is in abeyance ; imagination comes 
to the rescue, and from the long association with 
the old body, together with the knowledge and 
feeling of the soul that it is still alive, the new 
form takes automatically, so to speak, the sem- 
blance of the old. Besides, the germs of the cen- 
ters of sensation must be preserved, that they may 
expand and blossom in the next physical body, 
so that there is every reason why this inner form 
should be the counterpart of the one cast off. 
And there is ample evidence in the shape of dop- 
plegangers, or double appearances of the same per- 

* Chapter II 



54 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

son in two apparently identical bodies, to warrant 
the assertion above made as to the nature of the 
body which persists beyond the grave. It is physi- 
cal ; and, while not so gross as that with which the 
soul is now clothed, conserves every purpose, at 
least so far as preserving the sense of identity and 
I-am-ness, which the physical body accomplishes. 

The nature of the desires which follow the soul 
beyond the grave can but be a continuation and 
conservation of those which dominate it while in 
the physical body. Life is a continuous sequence ; 
each successive state the legitimate offspring of 
those which preceded it. While it is true that this 
sequence may be interrupted and entirely new di- 
rections given it by the will, yet it is also true that 
the human will is almost a negative factor at the 
present stage of human evolution. The animal 
will, or that which arises in the lower sensual de- 
sires, almost entirely dominates man, and this is 
that whose origin is in each fleeting moment, and 
as unstable as water. It is entirely incompetent to 
control and divert the intense desires of a long life 
of animal enjoyment into any new or different 
channel. The automatic habit of desiring certain 
things will of itself carry the soul far beyond the 
gates of the mere death of the body. 

But at death beneficent nature interrupts the 
succession of events by entirely depriving the soul 
of any new sense-enjoyments. There is, as we have 
seen, no seeing, hearing, or tasting, because the 



DEATH AND DESIRE-CONSCIOUSNESS 55 

organs are destroyed by death, and the most active 
mind will weary at length of internal desire when 
external gratification no longer follows. So that, 
little by little, these material, earthly desires die 
out from want of new stimulus, and inner and more 
spiritual ones begin to be active. Underneath the 
most stolid exterior, benumbed by the most selfish, 
and perhaps bestial, gratification of the animal na- 
ture, lie the dormant powers of a soul which is 
really divine. However tainted we may be with 
the personal equation, there are few who have not 
dreamed dreams of benefiting their fellow-men; 
who have not seen visions, however dimly, of the 
dawning of universal brotherhood; of an era of 
peace and good-will upon this sin-cursed earth. 
All these must have their time of activity ; every 
longing of the soul must be satisfied ; all desire, ex- 
cept that unquenchable one to live, must have at- 
tained fruition in the imagination, and have died 
out ere the soul returns to earth to again take its 
part in the grand harmony of Being. So after 
death one by one the desires will tend to become 
higher and purer, until the soul wearies and turns 
aside from the very last of them, and, breathing 
out its wordless prayer to its own divine Father in 
heaven, " Let me live again," returns to active self- 
conscious life, amid the old environments, and again 
takes up the task of the Ages — to transmute, in the 
crucible of sorrow and suffering, the baser metals of 
earthly life into the gold of spiritual existence. 



56 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

Desire, then, and desire alone, creates our life be- 
yond the grave. Each will construct for himself 
the place which he has prepared while in the body, 
and if it be a hell or a heaven, he may rest content 
with the assurance that he alone has been its sole 
architect. 



CHAPTER VIII 
EFFECT OF DEATH UPON THOUGHT AND IMAGINATION 

WE have now to examine more fully into the 
effect of death upon thought. By separ- 
ating it into its two poles, reason and im- 
agination, our task has become comparatively easy. 
Thought, as reason, is almost completely destroyed 
by death as an active process in the ordinary man. 
The potentiality of thinking remains, but its pro- 
vocative, sense-stimuli, no longer exists. For the 
chief use of reason upon any plane of manifested 
being is to predicate from the known the nature of 
the unknown ; and the unknown is contacted 
through exteriorizing any new plane by means of 
sense-organs constructed of the matter of that 
plane. Upon this molecular plane the sense-con- 
sciousness acting through molecular sense-organs 
must furnish the data which reason examines and 
from which it draws more or less correct con- 
clusions. Our senses also furnish the data with 
which the imagination must chiefly occupy itself 
until man has attained the power to soar beyond 
reason into the certainty of intuition and feeling. 
They can, of course, furnish no immediate data for 
the evolution of pity, compassion, love, etc., but 



58 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

the observation which they render imperative 
arouses through reason these latent faculties of the 
soul. 

Indeed, it will be well to remember at all times 
that the soul does not evolve, in the scientific sense 
of the term. All which it can ever become, all that 
the eternal ages can have in store for it, lies locked 
up in the infinite potentialities of its own being, and 
the passing panorama of physical phenomena only 
draws this into manifestation upon the finite side 
of life. Upon the infinite, unmanifested, subjective 
side of Being, may be all knowledge, all wisdom 
and all power, but it can only exist, as it seems to 
the writer, as one Infinite Whole or Unity. THAT 
is utterly unconscious by our standards, for these 
only begin with differentiation and consequent 
manifestation. The evolution (so-called) of the 
soul consists but in the transfer of the potential- 
ities of the great undivided, subjective SELF into 
the potencies of the manifested, differentiated sep- 
arate selves. And it may be that the sense of iso- 
lation and separation which now so saddens these 
separated selves will disappear when once the soul 
truly recognizes this fact of its basic One-ness with 
the Whole. 

Let him who thinks the soul evolves in the 
scientific sense of the word pause, and reflect. 
How many millions of years would it take for the 
wind and rain to produce a plant ? or for the sun 
to grow an eye upon the face of some granite boul- 



DEATH AND IMAGINATION 59 

der exposed directly to its rays ? Evolution is 
from within without, and the potentiality lies ever 
within, else not all the forces of the external uni- 
verse acting through the eternal ages could call it 
forth. The wind and the rain, the sun's rays and 
the darkness, force evolution, to be sure, but it is 
an evolution of something quite foreign to their 
own qualities — something to be found within the 
life germ alone. So that the phenomena of life do 
not produce, de novo, pity, hope or compassion, but 
they do stimulate these qualities of the soul itself 
into activity, just as the warmth and moisture 
compel the acorn to produce out of the germ within 
itself the mighty oak. The germ-soul, whether of 
the oak or the man, seizes upon the elements of 
that plane within which it is forced into activity, 
and constructs for itself a body which truly belongs 
to that particular plane, and which body as a 
form may be said to evolve, but it is always the 
inner force which guides the construction of the 
form; not the outer. Forms evolve under the 
stress of the necessities of the soul ; not the soul 
itself. The so-called forces of nature only afford 
the soul opportunity to transfer the potencies of 
the unmanifested to the manifested side of Being 
to arouse from latency into activity the wondrous 
faculties and powers concealed within itself. 

For reason to persist, it must be supplied with 
new data almost continuously. No doubt, the soul 
does reason in a dazed sort of way during that in- 



60 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

terval after death for which its fading memory 
affords food. But this must be soon exhausted 
with even the strongest minds. Isolate a man from 
all contact with his fellows — from all sources of 
new phenomena in nature about him, as is done in 
solitary confinement in certain penal institutions — 
and what happens ? First the weakening and then 
the total destruction of the reasoning powers. The 
man is driven into the excessive use of his imagin- 
ation, and soon fails to distinguish the real from 
the unreal. 

Let him who thinks that he has laid in a suffi- 
cient stock of knowledge in one short life to afford 
occupation for the rest of eternity sit down and en- 
deavor to anticipate that eternity by dwelling in 
his remembrances for even one hour, and he will 
perceive his mistake. So, after death, however 
vivid the remembrances of earth-life may be, the 
shutting out of new stimuli in the shape of new ex- 
periences, will soon cause reasoning upon the old to 
grow distasteful, and they will no longer command 
the attention of the reason, although the imagin- 
ation might find in them food for long centuries 
of activity during a purely subjective existence 
after death. 

There are, of course, certain stimuli which now 
in from the higher pole of man's being which may 
be truly termed subjective. But these are very 
rare in the ordinary man, and consist only in the 
more or less feeble attempts of the conscience to 



DEATH AND IMAGINATION 61 

force reason to consider the purport and effects of 
evil acts. These stimuli are no doubt very active 
for a short period after death, and may prove a 
source of much suffering for a time. But the to- 
tally different conditions, from those which it has 
been taught to anticipate, which meet the soul at 
death must soon dissipate all fear of hell, and with 
the disappearance of fear (but too often the only 
means of commanding attention which conscience 
possesses) these subjective stimuli are no longer 
heeded and the imagination assumes full control. 

Like all force, that of the imagination, takes the 
direction of least resistance, which in this case is 
that of the greatest desires, and so each soul, when 
it falls completely under the dominion of the im- 
agination, will construct for itself such environ- 
ments as afford it the greatest satisfaction. As 
pointed out by Madame H. P. Blavatsky, if this be 
the Christian heaven, the soul will imagine itself to 
be there ; if it be a Musselman paradise, this will be 
constructed. And no doubt the sincere Methodist 
will spend much of his subjective existence before 
again incarnating in a long, large and enthusiastic 
protracted meeting, during which innumerable sin- 
ners will be converted. 

If one be advanced so far as to be unable to be 
deluded by his imagination, his reason will be ex- 
ercised upon these inner stimuli, as well as from 
the stimuli coming from the exterior of his plane 
of thought, for the power to exteriorize inner con- 



62 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

ditions of matter keeps step with the widening of 
the area of consciousness. Such an one will use his 
imagination consciously in actual creation, and not 
be left to the vagaries of its unconscious exercise — 
a good example of which latter we see in dreams. 
For just as our reason is very imperfect, so also is 
our imagination, and neither give scarcely a hint 
of what their perfected powers really are. This 
universe, for example, is brought into existence by 
the creative imagination of high beings who were 
once men ; whom we may reverence but not worship, 
for they are of the same essence as ourselves, and 
are our brothers — not our gods. Where they are 
we must, in the eons of eternity, surely arrive. 

These higher stimuli flow into the mind at all 
times during life, and constitute, as we have seen, 
the source in which arises the higher mentality as 
contra-distinguished from the lower. They consist 
of the reproofs of conscience, flashes of intuition, 
feelings of pity and compassion, etc., but they are 
so few and so little heeded, that they are hardly 
worth considering in the ordinary man. " Do unto 
others as they do unto you," is good enough ethics 
for him, and his after-death life will be according 
to his thought and desire. He who is seeking to 
honestly explore the beyond will take facts as he 
finds them and reason accordingly, and will not 
promise an eternity of happiness to one who, out of 
cowardice perhaps, repents at his last gasp. The 
future of the ordinary man will be constructed out 



DEATH AND IMAGINATION 63 

of the same material, and in the same manner as 
are his ordinary dreams, and if they are at first 
unpleasant, he may be consoled by the fact that, 
with the cessation of his earth-desires, he will con- 
struct the best heaven which he is capable of en- 
joying. 

At any rate, it has been made plain that the soul 
can not hope to take its ordinary reasoning powers 
with it beyond the grave until it has crossed many 
wide and deep abysses in its evolutionary path- 
way. Reason will cease for the simple and logical 
cause that there will be nothing to think about. 
No new stimuli can reach the soul because of the 
destruction of the sense organs, and because it has 
not constructed, or evolved, those which will enable 
it to exteriorize the next inner, ordinarily termed 
the astral or ethereal according to the bent of the 
mind. That these organs are beginning to be 
evolved^ the phenomena of trance, clairvoyance, 
etc., prove beyond peradventure, but if they were 
evolved to any large extent all would undoubtedly 
be clairvoyant and clairaudient, or be able to 
see and hear upon astral planes. Those souls who 
have, by turning their attention to them, stimu- 
lated abnormally the evolution of their astral or- 
gans will have an unhappy time after death, for 
reasons which will be pointed out in their proper 
place. 

The imagination is. as we have asserted, a native 
faculty of the soul and one of the most important 



64 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

which it possesses. Within its mysterious recesses 
lie unlimited potentialities. During life, and espe- 
cially during waking life, its powers are but seldom 
appealed to, and never to create upon the physical 
plane. Yet the hour must come to every soul when 
it shall create physically by the power of imagina- 
tion — else is evolution a snare and this material 
universe an unreal nightmare oppressing the sleep 
of material monsters. For though this universe 
was planned by divine Ideation, yet the models 
upon which are built its wilderness of forms, were 
constructed by the creative imagination of entities 
which, while divine, are almost infinitely lower than 
those in whose thought the cosmic plan originated. 
Blind force taking the direction of the least resist- 
ance never did, nor never will, produce form; its 
efforts can only end in chaos. Yet it would be as 
absurd to suppose the Absolute, or whatever we 
choose to term Creative Deity, to occupy itself 
with arranging and unfolding the petals of a daisy, 
as it would be to suppose a supervising architect to 
occupy himself in actually laying the bricks of the 
building he had planned. 

But the architect must know the office and nature 
of bricks, and be able to determine whether or not 
the work has been well done. Therefore, as these 
lower cosmocratores are also divine — are a portion 
of the Divine Mind, even as man is himself — so, 
through this lower portion of itself, is Divine Idea- 
tion conscious of even the tracings upon the most 



DEATH AND IMAGINATION 65 

delicate fern. But neither the tracings nor the fern 
itself are reasoned into existence — they are imag- 
ined to be, and, lo ! they are. 

Reason is but one-half of thought, just as the 
negative current is but one-half of electricity. 
Indeed, the office of reason and that of imagina- 
tion are so different that while unquestionably 
interdependent faculties of the soul, their action 
may be profitably studied independently of each 
other. Reason is of necessity constantly occupied 
with the problems of an unknown universe and its 
labors therefore placed upon the pinnacle of use- 
ful human attainment, while imagination is as 
constantly but foolishly relegated to the domain of 
the false and the unreal. It is assigned, half 
contemptuously, to the poet, or artist, who is him- 
self looked upon as a visionary and unprofitable 
member of the community. Yet imagination re- 
venges herself upon her self-appointed master by 
yielding to thought but vagaries, when her powers, 
enfeebled by disuse, are called by some unforseen 
necessity into active operation. 

Still, how perfect is a perfect dream ! Yet every 
detail is the work of the imagination alone, for 
reason only interferes here to spoil, and causes but 
an unwelcome awakening. The mingling with the 
loved and lost, but who by the alchemy of the im- 
agination are no longer lost but gloriously present; 
the perfect peace and harmony; the assembly or 
landscape with not one detail marred or absent — 



66 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

ought not these things to awaken us to the wonder- 
ful faculty of the soul which lies ready to our hand 
when we shall become wise enough to use it ? 

And this glorious faculty is untouched by death ! 
Indeed, the perfect stilling of the roar of the senses 
which follows upon the separation of the soul from 
its physical encasement affords it ideal conditions 
for the exercise of its wonderful powers. As we 
have seen, it is an entirely interior faculty, the soul, 
even though awake, abandoning externals com- 
pletely when exercising the imagination in its 
purity. To think a thing out — a common expres- 
sion — is slow and laborious, but to imagine it — 
how different is the process ! Those who have en- 
abled it by use to throw off its partial paralysis 
and who are thus able to exteriorize, or to see its 
creations pass before their eyes, are alone capable 
of appreciating what its full, unfolded potencies 
may contain. With eyes closed to all but its per- 
fect visions, with ears dulled to all but its magical 
sounds, the subjective life of the soul under the 
beneficent administration of the imagination may 
and does become the very highest bliss. 

Its exercise during waking life is marred by a 
sense of unreality caused by the presence of the 
taint of reason. Death removes all this. He who 
has suffered the amputation of a limb believes that 
he feels the presence of the severed toes because the 
apparatus for conveying impressions has been di- 
vided and not completely destroyed. Much more 



DEATH AND IMAGINATION 67 

perfectly will the inner sense-centers left after the 
destruction of the body by death continue to repro- 
duce the scenes and impressions of the last life, and 
all under the guidance of the dominant desires of 
that life. 

Indeed, this is so faithfully done that for a time 
it constitutes the means by which karma * adjusts 
effect to cause, and bestows upon each one the kind 
of a subjective life which he deserves. For he who 
has been low and vicious will have low and vicious 
imaginings, which will surely end with imaginary 
detection and punishment. And this must con- 
tinue until the stock of sense-impressions of this 
nature is exhausted and those of a deeper stratum 
are uncovered, when his happy, or devachanic, im- 
aginings will begin. 

That which was to be shown, however, is the 
persistence of the imagination after death, and the 
possibility of this has been undoubtedly estab- 
lished. Sleeping is but a shorter death, and in its 
states of consciousness we have the warrant for the 
persistence of the imagination. Most dreams, it is 
true, are chaotic reproductions of the lowest sense- 
impressions, but they are none the less the work of 
the imagination. And if this faculty, at work in 
the unwieldy, molecular matter of the brain, can 
produce such perfect pictures, how much more must 
it be able to accomplish when its vehicle is that 

* Karma — that truly infinite and omniscent law which adjusts 
effects to causes, whether on the material or spiritual side of nature. 



68 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

ethereal, perfected substance which is the vesture 
of the soul! For it will be admitted by all but 
those who deny its existence altogether, that the 
soul uses this material, molecular body as a vehicle 
to express its innate powers, and to bring it into 
sensuous relation with the earth. It is also plain 
that the* matter of which the body is constituted is 
gross and unwieldy, and that the soul with diffi- 
culty enforces obedience. Man's life is a continu- 
ous warfare with the passions and appetites of the 
body, thus showing to all but the willfully blind 
that the soul is the transient tenant of its tenement 
of clay. Can not the soul, then, exhibit its divine 
qualities in other bodies, and exhibit them with all 
the greater freedom, if these bodies be composed of 
matter more plastic and yielding ? Nor can it be 
deprived by death of any but those faculties which 
depend for expression entirely upon the matter of 
the grossly physical body — in other words, it will 
be deprived of sense-impressions only. And it will 
only be deprived of these until it shall have built 
for itself a new body, when, after having assimilated 
all the wisdom possible out of the experiences of its 
past life during its subjective rest after death, it re- 
turns again to the physical earth to renew its old 
search for wisdom. 



CHAPTER IX 
EFFECT OF DEATH UPON INTUITION AND FEELINGS 

INTUITION is but the wisdom stored in the 
higher ego (incarnating ego) as the result of 
its experiences during its many incarnations 
upon earth. The memory of these experiences may 
be lost forever, and it is well that this is so, for 
it would consist very largely in a record of mis- 
takes and sins through many a long and weary 
life, but the net result, or the wisdom resulting 
therefrom, remains. As has been pointed out, the 
man who uses the multiplication table in his daily 
occupation does not wish to be encumbered by the 
memory of the hours spent in learning it origin- 
ally. It is one of the many evidences of the wis- 
dom of Those who planned this universe that its 
dissolution erases the records of the past, and only 
preserves the effects. The record of each earth-life 
is erased from the physical brain at each death of 
the body, and although preserved elsewhere in the 
more permanent vestures of the soul for a time, 
yet these, too, will likewise be overtaken with de- 
struction as the universes of manifestation slowly 
lapse back into Unmanifested Being. Thus eter- 
nity presents an eternal tabula rasa ; an infinite 



70 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

opportunity to begin anew, with the memory of 
past errors all expunged, while at the same time 
preserving the wisdom accruing therefrom. 

But intuition is the wisdom resulting from past 
experiences, and can never be destroyed. It will 
pass on life after life, and when all life as we can 
understand it is done, it will still be preserved in 
the unfathomable abysses of Infinite Wisdom. 

So with the Feelings. In the last analysis, they 
are consciousness itself and are just as indestruct- 
ible as is this. The only question which could 
possibly arise is, whether the feelings are preserved 
as an individual expression; whether egoism ac- 
companies them back to the Infinite, as it has cer- 
tainly accompanied them as a potentiality in their 
journey out from that Infinite. That the feeling of 
ego-hood, of I-am-I, has arisen in nature, and is 
now expressing itself in man, is conclusive proof 
that it came from Divinity and will re-become 
divine, even if it does not constitute the very es- 
sence of Divinity itself, as many philosophers, 
notably Hegel, have believed and taught. No 
stream can rise higher than its source, and if we 
find the feeling of I-am-ness expressing the very 
acme of consciousness and at the apex of evolution, 
we may expect confidently that it will be still 
farther accentuated as man rises to higher states. 
Our selfish conception of it will and must disap- 
pear, but who can conceive of the power and 
glory of an Hierarchial I — a great note of common 



DEATH AND THE FEELINGS 71 

consciousness as much beyond the petty, personal I 
as the united strength of all humanity is superior 
to that of any unit thereof ? And beyond this lies 
the cosmic I, and still beyond the universal I-am- 
myself-and-all-others, of perfected bliss ! 

So that we have every warrant for assuming that 
the feelings will always be associated with an I 
who feels them, and that this I will never cease to 
be our very selves, although we may be made 
happy beyond all conception in rinding that within 
that which we feel and know to be our own ego- 
hood is also that of all humanity — of all that 
lives and breathes. 

For this is brotherhood : to find within our own 
hearts all our lost brothers; to hear in our own 
voice, the tone, the mass-chord of all humanity, 
and to feel that in the far-off eons to come we may 
be able to include the entire manifested universe in 
one solemn, cosmic harmony that breathes its. and 
our, bliss in one great I- AM ! 



CHAPTER X 
THE MORTAL AND THE IMMORTAL MAN 

IT has become clear in the course of our study 
that man falls naturally into a mortal and an 
immortal portion — a perishable and an im- 
perishable part but thinly welded together and 
easily separable. The materialistic belief that the 
whole man perishes at death, and the equally ma- 
terialistic teaching of one life in a physical body 
followed by an incomprehensible, eternal heaven 
or hell, are both due to the same causes. They 
arise in mistaking the man of flesh for the real 
man, and for the somewhat childish reason that he 
is tangible and in sensuous evidence, while the real 
man is not discoverable by the senses but must be 
sought out by the aid of reason — a thing which we 
proudly claim to possess, but of which only the 
first faint functionings are beginning to flutter and 
stir in our being. Reason, in the brain-mind, has 
only reached the stage of ignorant egotism, that 
wherein it sees nothing unreasonable in supposing 
that the sun and moon were created solely to light 
man's doddering footsteps by day, while the stars 
which inhabit the unthinkable abysses of space are 
only put there to afford a very imperfect substitute 



MORTAL AND IMMORTAL MAN 73 

for the sun and moon at night ! Nothing absurd is 
discovered in the teaching that this is the only in- 
habited spot in the universe ! Yet we think we 
reason ! It is well that the magnificent reason of 
our brain-minds does not follow us beyond this 
very imperfect life, but must be constructed anew 
at each return to earth. 

The mortal portion of man, having been con- 
structed especially to relate his consciousness to this 
earth — to enable him to approach a state of matter 
far below that of the real home of the soul by 
means of the coarse and imperfect senses — it is 
small wonder, in view of his imperfect reasoning 
powers, that this specially constructed bundle of 
sense-organs should appear of such paramount 
importance, or that earthly concerns should loom 
so large upon his mental horizons. Indeed, it is 
right that we should bend our energies and direct 
our will towards any task at hand, and not permit 
our minds to go wool-gathering. Our present 
task is to understand the meaning of life here, and 
to profit by its lessons, for the entire universe is 
divine, and no portion of it unnecessary to the 
soul's experiences. It is, therefore, only the fatuity 
of unnecessary ignorance which makes man blind 
to this indwelling, immortal portion. All nature 
cries aloud that existence does not depend upon the 
material form, and demonstrates this beyond cavil 
every time it reproduces the dead plant, with every 
detail preserved in all its perfection, from a seed or 



74 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

bulb. Except in a few instances, as the lotus, for 
example, there is absolutely no hint of the form 
which lies hidden in the germ that reproduces either 
animal or vegetable creations. The one seed will 
evolve from its mysterious recesses the humble, tiny 
fern ; its exact counterpart, the acknowledged 
monarch of the forest. Two ovums, almost exactly 
identical in external appearance and internal his- 
tology, will result in the colossal elephant and the 
pigmy mouse. This divergence in form is solely 
due to the inner force coming from the soul-side of 
nature; the so-called external forces — the air, sun- 
shine, earth, water, etc, — are powerless to produce 
the slightest original variation. 

Scientists have dissected and analyzed the ma- 
terial universe to discover the secret source of the 
wonderful development of life, and have at last 
been compelled to admit the old, despised vital 
force as a factor. And, however external the 
sources of the ordinary physical forces may appear, 
this vital force comes from within — from some 
mysterious realm to which the senses, aided with 
all the instruments of precision of science, can not 
penetrate. This fact ought to have directed atten- 
tion to an inner man as the permanent base upon 
which the outer was constructed, but it did not. 
Earth and its transient concerns have been held to 
be of paramount importance, and the interests of 
the real man neglected and forgotten. 

Man loses by death his sense-organs which re- 



MORTAL AND IMMORTAL MAN 75 

lated him to the earth of molecular matter. With 
them he loses the power to externalize his universe, 
and must live in a world of his own creating until 
he rebuilds his sense-organs upon reincarnating. 
The senses, also, having furnished the data upon 
which reason was exercised, the latter power slowly 
ceases its functions under the lack of new stimuli. 
Comparing, therefore, the permanent with the im- 
permanent portions of man's nature, we have : 

THE MORTAL MAN THE IMMORTAL MAN 

The Senses The Consciousness of Life 

The Lower Desires The Imagination 

The Emotions Intuition 

The Brain-Mind The Feelings. 

Reason (due to objective- Reason (due to subjective 

stimuli) stimuli) 

The Physical Body The Causal Body 

The Astral Body (Linga 

Sarira) 

It is at once apparent how perfect is the man 
who passes on from life to life — the eternal Pil- 
grim, for whom death does not exist — and how 
imperfect and unimportant the unreal man who 
passes away at death. The physical and astral 
body perish, and with them go all the lower man — 
his impulses, his lower desires a emotions, brain- 
mind, and all thought which is aroused by the 
senses. But the soul takes with it the conscious- 
ness of life, the imagination, the higher, or subjec- 
tively aroused reason, the intuitions, the feelings, 



76 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

and all these in a body so stable, yet so ethereal, 
that no entity struggling in the cycle of evolution 
can disturb the perfect peace and safety of man's 
subjective existence. Nay, no entity lower than the 
gods can even know of his existence — much less 
disturb his felicity. He exists far above — or with- 
in — the great ocean of being; where change is not; 
where the ceaseless struggle for place, which af- 
fords the necessary training ground for entities 
actively climbing the ascents of life, is unknown. 
He does not exist; he IS. He has ascended, if but 
temporarily, to the Sources of Life ; he sits beside 
the Fountain of Being. 

It may seem startling to the unthinking to assert 
that the brain-mind perishes ; yet not only is this 
true, but all progress would be choked and 
stopped, if it were not so. That this is true is self- 
evident from the fact that all start with absolutely 
no mind at birth. Whatever hypothesis of life we 
may set up, all must admit that the brain-mind is 
the result of experience and education, acting un- 
der the law of cause and effect. The higher mind 
comes over as a potentiality, and is only capable 
of exhibiting its powers when the necessary condi- 
tions are furnished. Genius is evidence that the 
higher mind, or that belonging to the reincarnating 
ego, is enabled to act, and its rarity is the warrant 
for the assertion that the great mass of humanity 
live only in the brain-mind. For much that is 
called genius is not at all this divine faculty. 



MORTAL AND IMMORTAL MAN 77 

Musical, mathematical, and other infant prodigies, 
are often but the effects of brain-mind training ac- 
quired in former lives, and which passes over as the 
karmic heirloom of the lower ego — not the higher. 
A very fine mathematician, for example, may be 
very low morally, and the same is true of musicians, 
which shows that this is not the higher ego manifes- 
ting its divine functions, but a karmic sequence of 
lower, brain-mind training. The tendency to, and 
expertness in, thieving or counterfeiting, may be, 
and is, also transmitted as the effects of a former 
life of crime, yet we would hardly, in these in- 
stances, term the unfortunate possessor a genius. 
But this has been fully dealt with in the previous 
works of the author. 

It is evident that the brain-mind represents the 
mortal man, for it perishes at the death of the mor- 
tal portion. The possessor of an hundred painfully 
acquired languages, for example, loses all recollec- 
tion of them after death, or at least before reincar- 
nating. Much of the training and instruction that 
our brain-minds receive is positively hurtful, as cul- 
tivating shrewdness and similar qualities at the ex- 
pense of the finer feelings and altruistic sentiments. 
Witness the philanthropist, who is almost univer- 
sally regarded as a kind of softy, to be admired, per- 
haps, but not imitated by any means. 

So that he who is compelled, or rather permitted, 
by death to retire to the divine shores of subjective 
life, leaves little, indeed, of any value behind. He 



78 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

is in an incorruptible body ; he has the conscious- 
ness of pure, blissful existence ; he constructs his 
own paradise by the divine power of his imagina- 
tion; intuition and the higher reason abide as 
faculties for use in the next earth-life ; the divine 
feelings of pity, compassion, love, hope, find in this 
subjective state ideal conditions for their divine 
functions. For who in the body, even, would not 
relieve suffering and make others happy if he could 
do so without cost to himself, and without con- 
scious effort ? All this the soul freed by death from 
bodily desires and limitations can in its imagina- 
tion do and, therefore, however much it may be dis- 
turbed by its lower desires for a time after death, 
when these subside, and the real, subjective life of 
the true ego begins, it will be dominated only by 
the very highest desires of which it ever dreamed 
while in that body now cast aside. 



CHAPTER XI 



THE PROCESS OF DEATH 



DEATH itself is at present a most mysterious 
and appaling phenomenon. It takes place 
under the law of cycles, which is itself in- 
explicable. We can only recognize death as a law 
of Being, and submit to its immutable decrees. 

It is a phenomenon of change, and, of course, oc- 
curs most quickly and oftenest where change is the 
most rapid. And that, unfortunately for mortals, 
is exactly the condition which obtains in our un- 
stable world. Not in all the eternities during which 
it has existed has it been for a single moment the 
same. It is a Wandering Jew — unable to find rest 
until it shall be at last dissipated in space. From 
the moment in which its star-dust began to be mag- 
netically attracted towards a non-magnetic center, 
throughout all the states of fire, gaseous, liquid, and 
solid, down to that in which it slowly dissipates in 
space — a cold, dead moon — a world is under the 
domain of change ; of restless, resistless motion 
not only as a mass, but down to its tiniest 
molecule. 

Death is a change which need be neither mys- 
terious nor appalling. It is our benighted view of 



80 THE PROCESS OF DEATH 

life, the belief that we are here upon earth for the 
first time, and that we leave it for all eternity in 
dying, which makes it seem dreadful and awesome. 
We have refused to look beyond the grave from the 
point of view of common sense — to say nothing of 
true science — and can see naught in the gulf be- 
yond; a gulf entirely of our own creating. The 
most superficial examination ought to have con- 
vinced us that the body was not the real man, and 
that its perishing was but a comparatively trivial 
incident in the progress of the soul. The body 
changes constantly from the cradle to the grave ; 
the soul is a spectator, and its recognition of self is 
immutable and eternal. It lives in the eter- 
nal Present, in that NOW whose mysterious 
persistence affords mortals a hint of the real na- 
ture and essence of eternity. It is NOW with the 
first dawn of consciousness in the child ; it is NOW 
when the vigor of manhood is attained ; it is still 
NOW when the panorama of molecular life fades 
because the failing bodily senses no longer enable 
the soul to perceive it. Ought not this persistent 
now-ness to lead us to suspect the truth — that the 
soul belongs not to time, but to eternity? and that 
time is but an illusion caused by the fleeting pan- 
orama of material phenomena ? 

The body dies, as said, in obedience to the law of 
cycles — that mysterious ebbing and flowing of 
something which would seem to be akin to a posi- 
tive and negative life-electricity, and which will 



THE PROCESS OF DEATH 81 

not permit a permanent association of the life- 
atoms, but drives them asunder when some un- 
known point of equalization of energy is reached. 
Normal death is as painless and far more pleasant 
than the sinking into sleep of a tired wanderer. 
That tremendous energy which, in the case of the 
the heart suffices to lift so many tons of foot- 
pounds of blood during the twenty-four hours, and 
in the deltoid muscle alone enables it to exert a 
force of some six-hundred pounds, when, after 
death, the same muscle will only sustain a bare 
fifty; that mysterious, wonderful force is with- 
drawn, and the body dies — quietly, suddenly, pain- 
lessly. No illness precedes it, for it is a perfectly 
normal process. If there be suffering in abnormal 
death it is because it is abnormal, but it is doubtful 
even in this case. The accumulation of carbonic 
acid gas through the failure of the respiration and 
circulation acts as an anaesthetic in almost all 
cases, and death is thus rendered painless. 

But during this process of physical death occurs 
an awesome, fearsome hour for the soul. It is 
brought directly before the Judgment Seat, and sees 
all its acts pass before its freed and quickened 
vision, knows wherein it has sinned, and in what it 
has done well. For the Judge upon the Judgment 
Seat is ITSELF. Freed from the clamor and con- 
fusion of the senses, with all its powers evoked and 
quickened by the tremendously important event 
which is taking place, the soul itself sits in judg- 



82 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

ment upon its past life. No sin can be hidden, for 
the soul knows them all — participated in them 
all. There can be no hiding from that GOD which 
we suddenly find our real selves to be! All through 
life the Judge has spoken — has warned its lower, 
incarnated self when it walked in evil paths, but 
alas, too often the solemn voice was unheeded! 
Materialistic philosophy (so-called) has even tried 
to still its counsels by declaring it to be only the 
outcome and product of education and environ- 
ment. For the voice of the Judge during life is 
CONSCIENCE, and although it may say different 
things to different men — may even issue contradict- 
ory commands in different cases — yet it never fails 
to warn a man of the wrong he contemplates, and 
to point out the best and highest path which he has 
rendered it possible for him to take. That it tells 
a savage that he ought to kill his enemy, is not be- 
cause it is right to kill enemies, but because the 
savage has so benumbed its voice that nothing bet- 
ter than this can be understood by him. From 
whatever heights one may have attained, into what- 
ever depths one may have fallen, its voice is always 
perceived, counseling the very highest which that 
particular soul can understand. It holds no one 
to account except for those conceptions of right 
and wrong which he is capable of understanding. 
It draws no hard and fast line to which all must 
hew. One man's right is not another's, unless he is 
capable of realizing fully its ethical bearings. It 



THE PROCESS OF DEATH 83 

will lead any soul out of any depths, however low, 
if he but live up to its highest warnings, for as his 
moral perceptions become less clouded by his up- 
ward effort, so will it set newer and ever higher 
conceptions before him. Because it speaks in dif- 
fering voices to differing men is not that the source 
is less divine, but that the vehicle through which it 
must make itself heard is less perfect. 

Man is the very highest expression of divinity 
upon earth, and the depth and grandeur of that 
divinity he little realizes when incarnated in, 
and listening to, the roar of the senses. But in the 
solemn hour of death these are stilled, the soul 
stands in the presence of its Higher Self; judges 
itself, and KNOWS that the judgment is just. This 
reviewing of the acts and thoughts of the passing 
life is too well attested by science to be questioned. 
Case after case of partial drowning, or hanging, or 
deadly peril to bodily existence, have been recorded 
wherein the whole life, down to its most minute de- 
tail, has passed in review under the extraordinary 
stimulus of the circumstances which encompassed 
the soul. But such cases are only faint foreshad- 
owings of that which takes place when death has 
really seized upon the body. Here, the busy brain 
deliberately reviews the ebbing life to its uttermost 
detail, and, without passing any formal sentence, 
simply KNOWS the effect which will await each 
act if the account have not been already balanced. 
It sees the circumstances which must surround it in 



84 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

its next life, in order to satisfy that exact justice 
which holds the universe in its unrelaxing grasp. 
Being divine, and face to face with its own divinity, 
it demands that justice be done even though the 
future life which confronts it be full of the blackest 
horror. Nothing but personal suffering, it well 
knows, can atone for the personal sin. The soul 
stands in the presence of the Christ, which is itself ! 
None but the SELF may atone for its lower selves, 
and this can only be done by affording exact justice 
in every instance of transgression. 

That the soul willingly yields to the delights and 
temptations of sensuous existence, is shown in that 
sincere repentance which so often accompanies ill- 
ness. This fact has passed into a popular proverb 
which runs : 

The devil got sick — 

The devil a monk would be ; 

The devil got well — 
The devil a monk was he ! 

Such an universal desire and resolution to live a 
better life when this physical one seems to be ap- 
proaching its end, is the surest proof that we are 
not living up to the well-understood behests of our 
conscience. If we quail in the presence of the 
voice of conscience in sickness, how will it be when 
the soul stands in its presence with all its deeds 
fully unveiled in the hour of death ? 

This is the bar, and the only bar, before which 
the soul will ever be arraigned. In this court 



THE PROCESS OF DEATH 85 

there can be no partiality, no forgetting, no con- 
fusing, no forgiving. Only justice — exact justice. 
The soul will go forth from it not to everlasting 
damnation nor to eternal bliss, but to the atone- 
ment of another life, where it will have opportunity 
to right all the wrong it has done, and to stand be- 
fore itself at the end of its long pilgrimage, justi- 
fied and glorified! 

We can follow by the light of scientific facts the 
fate of the soul even after death for a time, and 
know what awaits it. This is due to the fact that 
life is continuous, and that no hard and fast lines 
divide life in the body from that out of, and be- 
yond, the body. One of the most instructive ex- 
periences along this line of phenomena is recorded 
by a physician. It is especially valuable because 
of the trained power of observation and ability to 
analyze which its experiencer possessed. He re- 
lates that as he lay upon his bed, severely ill, he 
appeared to die — and did die, so far as the obser- 
vation of his attendants could determine. He 
found himself out of his body and watching with 
a curious interest the weeping relatives who sur- 
rounded it. Suddenly he perceived that he was 
entirely naked, and feeling somewhat abashed he 
started to leave the room, but had not reached the 
door when, to his surprise, he found himself 
clothed. Passing out of the house, he noted all the 
objects with which long association had made him 
familiar. Nothing appeared new nor strange until 



86 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

he had gone some little distance, when the road, 
perfectly normal heretofore, suddenly ascended into 
the sky. From this time the real and the unreal 
were strangely blended, growing more and more 
confused, until a lapse of consciousness ensued, 
when the physician found himself again in the 
body, with his relatives rejoicing at his apparent 
resuscitation from the dead. 

Now, if this entirely truthful account is carefully 
studied, it will be at once apparent that the imag- 
ination plays the leading role in. the soul's con- 
sciousness after death. The feeble remains of the 
physical senses enabled the bodiless soul to locate 
itself physically for a time, but were not sufficient 
to prevent the subjective visions of the imagination 
being interjected. All of us unconsciously locate 
heaven above, notwithstanding the fact that above 
is never the same direction for any two successive 
moments. For this reason, the physician uncon- 
sciously to himself projected the road in an upward 
direction — pretty good evidence, by-the-way, that 
his conscience was not troubled very much, else it 
would undoubtedly have inclined to the opposite 
angle ! Similarly, the clothing which appeared in 
response to his unexpressed desire for it, shows 
how quickly the imagination responds to our light- 
est thought. Out of its depths all the environments 
of the naturally disembodied soul appear as surely 
and as instantaneously as when God said: "Let 
there be light ; and there was light !" 



THE PROCESS OF DEATH 87 

To each soul must come differing experiences 
after death because each one will create differing 
surroundings out of the resources of his own imag- 
ination. The persistence of the remains of the 
senses will be much greater in some than in others. 
The activity of the imagination will be displayed in 
a thousand ways, accordingly as the passing life 
has given it trend or bias. Out of its activities will 
grow all the heavens and all the hells which the 
soul ever experiences in post-mortem conditions. 
And when the imagination shall have become 
wearied, or its stock of material exhausted, then 
will come a new rest and sleep — only this time the 
sleep will be that waking dream we call earth-life ! 



CHAPTER XII 
THE RE-EMBODIMENT OF THE SOUL 

THE relation of the soul to the body and to the 
disembodied state can not be adequately ex- 
plained except the fact of its repeated re- 
embodiment or reincarnation be accepted. As this 
is an unfamiliar belief in Western lands, it has been 
thought best by the writer to condense the evidence 
which demonstrates it to be a fact in nature, and 
the chief factor in, or, rather, the very process of, 
evolution, into a brief chapter upon this subject. 

An examination of the philosophy and fact of 
reincarnatfon demands the establishing of the 
affirmative of the following propositions, viz: 

1st. That re-embodiment is a universal law in 
every kingdom and upon every plane of nature, 
and includes man by virtue of his being a part of 
nature, distinct in but not separate from the 
Whole. 

2nd. That reincarnation in man is a specific 
return of the same, distinct, individualized soul to 
successive bodies without less of CQnscious iden- 
tity. 

These two propositions — the second of which is 
indeed but a corollary of the first — are fully 



RE-EMBODIMENT OF THE SOUL 89 

capable of proof under the most exacting methods 
of scientific procedure. The latter has been declared 
by a German philosopher to be only scientific when 
all investigators can arrive at similar results by re- 
peating the processes of any alleged demonstration. 
This test Theosophy fully accepts in its proof of 
the fact of reincarnation ; and only demands that 
the steps by which it arrives at this demonstration 
be repeated and not set aside without proper exam- 
ination, as is too largely the custom of so-called 
scientists of the West when dealing with the spirit- 
ual aspect of nature. 

The proofs of reincarnation, then, are to be found 
in the law of evolution, of which it is the process, 
and in the further laws of the conservation of force 
and the indestructibility of matter. Certain axio- 
matic truths will also be of service if kept in 
mind as we proceed, the most important of 
which are : 

That the lesser can not contain the greater. 

That the widening of a conscious area is the ex- 
act equivalent of a physical or mathematical addi- 
tion upon lower planes. 

That any law in nature must of necessity be uni- 
versal. 

In illustration of this last truth of the necessary 
universality of law, a moment's digression may be 
permitted in order to show why any law whatever 
which obtains in any kingdom of nature must be 
an universal law. This is easily accomplished, for 



90 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

if it be not universal then it would conflict with 
some superior law, and cease to exist. And two 
conflicting or opposing forces can not be present in 
the cosmos, however much the universal pairs of 
opposites would seem to imply this, for either they 
must be equal or unequal. If equal, then nature 
would rest throughout eternity upon an infinite 
dead center, each force would exactly neutralize the 
other and no progression nor evolution be possible. 
If unequal, then in the eternities of the past the 
greater must have overcome the lesser, and it would 
have become practically and actually non-existent. 
So that one single instance of reincarnation or re- 
clothing in matter of the inner, spiritual essence 
establishes the universality of the process, even if 
it seems to elude our discovery as a potency in ac- 
tion upon all planes of the cosmos. Theosophy 
claims as a fact that the law of re-embodiment is an 
actual and potent factor in every process in the 
cosmos, but that the cycles required to complete its 
vaster operations are so immense that the small 
portion of their arcs which one brief life subtends 
is so minute that we are unable to perceive that it 
is a portion of a tremendous spiral, and not the 
straight line we have imagined. It is to such im- 
mense cycles that we must assign the re-embodiment 
or re-birth of stars and worlds ; the sufficient proof 
of which is in the fact that upon lower planes we 
have discovered the action of this foice or mode of 
motion which must of necessity be universal, and 



RE-EMBODIMENT OF THE SOUL 91 

so by correspondence and analogy we apply the 
law in these higher instances. 

In the demonstration of the first postulate, that 
reincarnation is universal throughout nature, the 
law of the conservation of force will be first exam- 
ined, after which appeal will be had to the facts of 
evolution. At the very outset certain self-evi- 
dent generalizations under these laws of evolution 
and force conservation must be briefly defined. 
These are : 

That evolution is continuously displacing the 
threshold of consciousness in man and in nature, 
and thus compelling the constant widening of the 
conscious area of every entity in nature. 

That this continuous addition to conscious ex- 
periences, and the infinite variation of conscious 
states, necessitates the ultimate individualization 
of conscious centers of force, or units of conscious- 
ness, moving in orbits or along lines pre-deter- 
mined by the coloring and limitations arising out 
of past conscious association. 

That as a result of this individualization of such 
conscious centers within the -whole, atoms, elements, 
and molecules are continuously being correlated in 
higher forms of matter by conscious entities seek- 
ing higher expressions of consciousness under the 
stress of evolutionary necessities. And, lastly, 
which brings us logically and legitimately to our 
second basic postulate : 

That the human soul has been thus individual- 



92 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

izedj without having been separated from the whole 
of nature, and as a consequence reincarnates in 
successive bodies as a distinct, individualized, self- 
conscious center of consciousness, or soul. 

Taking up the examination of the first general- 
ization, it is evident that in its correlation of force 
and conservation of energy, modern science has, 
unwittingly perhaps, laid the foundations upon 
which the structure of universal, cyclic reincarna- 
tion may be safely and even scientifically reared. 
For what is force? Science is dumb, except to de- 
fine it as anything which changes the relation be- 
tween atoms, molecules, and objects. Farther than 
this it refuses to go, although in the assertion that 
it is eternally conserved, it advances it to the dig- 
nity of an entity; for, if force had no real being, 
then it would be impossible for it to be conserved. 
It is an aspect entity, as Theosophy defines it ; or, 
in other words, it is one side of the manifested tri- 
angle behind whose veil the Absolute lies eternally 
concealed. Matter, force and consciousness are in- 
separable and co-eternal, and one can not be 
thought of as existing apart from the other two. 
Matter affords the vehicle; force (motion), the 
means ; and consciousness, the directing intelligence 
for every conceivable manifestation in the universe. 
Force must have a material vehicle or basis, and as 
it cannot be dissociated from this, if it be con- 
served, then its material basis is conserved, as must 
also be the associated intelligence which directs 



RE-EMBODIMENT OF THE SOUL 93 

its action. Until scientists can show pure force un- 
associated with matter and exhibiting no phase of 
intelligence, their proof that it is conserved carries 
with it the farther proof that its material base and 
guiding consciousness are also conserved. Science 
admits matter to be, like force, indestructible, yet, 
by the strangest inconsistency, it denies the perma- 
nency of the one element, intelligence, which alone 
renders possible the orderly sequence exhibited in 
the manifestations of its two admittedly indestruc- 
tible elements. 

The failure of modern science to recognize this 
universal reincarnation in nature arises from its 
faulty conception of the basic principles underly- 
ing the phenomenal universe. Refusing to recog- 
nize the absolute one-ness in origin of everything 
in the universe, whether force, matter or conscious- 
ness, Western scientists can not bring themselves 
to apply the laws obtaining upon the physi- 
cal plane to psychic and spiritual realms. They 
can very well see that force can not escape the 
grasp of the All-container, space, and recognize 
that matter, too, is limited by the same inexorable 
bounds; but consciousness, the superior and ruler 
of the other two, is most absurdly and illogically 
conceived of as capable of annihilation. It is true 
that this dilemma is sought to be avoided by claim- 
ing that consciousness is only a property of matter, 
manifested because of certain, they would have us 
believe, entirely fortuitous combinations of force 



94 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

and matter. But this claim is a purely gratuitous 
assumption. The idealists, who look upon matter 
as a property or product of consciousness, have 
even a better warrant for their position. 

The claim will not stand. When science shall 
have presented us with matter free from conscious- 
ness; unable to assert a determining choice, if 
resolved into its chemical elements and placed in 
the presence of other similarly situated elements, 
its property plea will be entitled to consideration; 
until then, the counter-claim that matter is a prop- 
erty of consciousness is equally valid. Therefore, 
in this inquiry, reincarnation will be proven by 
facts and phenomena capable of scientific observa- 
tion and classification only; scientific deductions 
therefrom being set aside as incomplete and incapa- 
ble of that universal generalization and application 
which Theosophy demands as a sine qua non of any 
and all laws in the universe. For, as stated, if 
matter is indestructible, then the material base of 
the soul is indestructible; if force is eternal in its 
action, this includes intellectual and spiritual or 
soul force, and hence the necessary preservation of 
the conscious factor in all its essential integrity as 
an element upon which the intelligent action of 
both matter and force depends. 

Therefore, to establish the universality of rein- 
carnation in nature, it is sufficient for the present, 
to rest upon the accepted fact that force is con- 
served ; that it but abandons one material guise to 



RE-EMBODIMENT OF THE SOUL 95 

reappear in another. Let us follow it for a time in 
its conservations and correlations and see if, before 
we proceed far, it does not prove to be something 
more than mere force, and thus establish as a cor- 
ollary the further truth that this process results in 
the necessary evolution of individualized centers of 
conscious force, or souls. 

At its every turn we perceive this empty abstrac- 
tion — this mere "matter in motion" — exercising 
choice as to its modes of motion. Atoms will only 
combine with other atoms in certain definite pro- 
portions. They cannot be made to exercise an in- 
discriminate selection and combination, such as 
would be their only method if force were the non- 
intelligent non-entity science would have us believe. 
So with molecular associations; they must have se- 
lective choice, or the combination perishes. Man 
can as easily fill his lungs with nitrogen alone as 
with a mixture of this and oxygen, yet, in the 
former case, would perish almost instantly because 
of the impossibility of atomic interchange taking 
place. All such refusals of atoms to enter intG 
combinations, when there is no other reason than 
non-affinity, show that there has already been such 
a divergence through former conscious experiences 
among the atoms that each seeks the line of its en- 
gendered affinities with an almost irresistible ten- 
dency. This shows the absolute truth of the asser- 
tion*-- in reality an axiom — that the laws of nature 
are universal, and that the addition of conscious- 



96 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

ness through additional experiences is just as truly 
an addition in magnitude as is the adding of one 
material molecule to another. By the latter process 
the physical magnitude is increased, rendering a 
double amount of space necessary, under the law 
that two bodies can not occupy the same space at 
the same time ; by the former, the conscious area is 
widened, and can never be compressed back into 
the old limits any more than can the oak be com- 
pressed again within the limits of the acorn in 
which it had its physical origin, and this under 
the law that the lesser can not contain the greater. 
It is plain that, under this law, consciousness which 
has impressed upon it the vegetable stamp, can 
never re-enter the mineral kingdom ; it has widened 
its area beyond the limits capable of finding ex- 
pression in that kingdom. Similarly conscious 
centers of force which have reached the animal can 
not again re-enter the vegetable plane, nor can hu- 
man consciousness ever again function in the ani- 
mal kingdom. All of these facts, depend, primar- 
ily, upon the law that the lesser can not contain 
the greater, and, secondarily, upon the necessity 
of law upon one plane obtaining upon all the 
planes of the cosmos. Human consciousness added 
to animal consciousness is as veritable an addition 
as that 2-|-2=4. 

If the law be thus general in its application it is 
also particular, for the whole is composed of its 
parts. So that a center of conscious force by con- 



RE-EMBODIMENT OF THE SOUL 97 

tinual addition to its experience in different species 
of the vegetable kingdom would slowly but surely 
eliminate its possibilities of choice until it would 
be driven, by the final impossibility of finding a 
suitable vehicle in this kingdom, to seek an avenue 
for its widening intelligence in a higher one, or, in 
this instance, the animal kingdom. Here the same 
cumulative widening of consciousness would in the 
course of ages of successive incarnations tend to 
bring these conscious centers to the same condi- 
tion; and, indeed, we are told in the Secret Doc- 
trine that some of the higher animals have almost 
reached the plane of definitely individualized mo- 
nads — in other words, the lower margin of the 
human plane. 

This inevitable widening of conscious area and 
consequent individualization of conscious centers, 
being plainly the necessary corollary of the con- 
servation of conscious force acting in harmony 
with and, indeed, guiding evolution, it will be evi- 
dent that as a result of this individualization the 
simpler elements as well as atoms and molecules 
are of necessity continuously built up and synthe- 
sized into higher forms in order to afford expres- 
sion in form for conscious entities too far progressed 
to longer use these lower substances. A conception 
of this truth will go far to elucidate the mysterious 
relation our own souls bear to our bodies. 

The proof of the synthesizing of lower entities by 
those higher rests upon the axiomatic proposition 



98 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

that the lesser can not contain the greater. Hence, 
if evolution is to proceed at all, its easiest and, in- 
deed necessary, method is for more advanced en- 
tities to take lower forms of matter and, without 
annuling, superceding, or even disturbing the con- 
sciousness of entities rinding in such lower forms 
their normal expression, to build up therefrom suit- 
able vehicles for their own higher need. And while 
so occupying forms composed of hosts, it may be, 
of lower entities, which they thus in no way dis- 
turb, the association must be helpful to the lower 
lives, for it necessarily infuses into their essence a 
faint emanation from that of the higher synthesiz- 
ing entity. Because of this bestowing of their own 
purer and more spiritual essence — which is also an 
universal law upon every plane of the cosmos — it 
is said in the Secret Doctrine* that "Compassion is 
an attribute of the very Absolute itself.'' 

This synthesizing of matter occupied by less 
progressed entities into composite bodies suited for 
the use of those higher, constitutes, together with 
the fact of their repeated reincarnation in such syn- 
thesized forms, the complete key to, and the very 
process of, evolution, as stated at the outset. That 
it is conscious entities which thus correlate lower 
into higher forms, is proven by the very fact of any 
form in any kingdom of nature being repeated at 
all. For if not so, then every new production of 

*"The Secret Doctrine: the synthesis of Science, Religion, and 
Philosophy," by H. P. Blavatsky : New York and London: 1893. 



RE-EMBODIMENT OF THE SOUL 99 

crystal, plant or animal, would be practically a new 
and perfectly fortuitous combination or creation of 
form, and all method, or necessity for method, 
would disappear from nature. There is no possible 
reason, except as the work of an intelligent, con- 
scious (not necessarily self-conscious) entity for 
the repetition of form and the preservation of 
species. And variation in form and ultimate ex- 
tinction of species only mark the gradual expan- 
sion of consciousness forcing the evolution of 
higher types. The agents of it all in the three 
lower kingdoms are the elementals, or nature spir- 
its, from those ensouled in the tiny moss upon its 
bark to the single, mighty one which builds and in- 
forms the giant oak. 

Each is an entity ; each on the road to ulti- 
mate individualization and self-consciousness, and 
each at a point where it has left those relatively 
lower eternally behind it in the scale of becoming. 
The lesser can never contain the greater. Nor can 
any one cell in the oak or in the man be shown to 
be so much superior to the others that in it lies the 
synthesizing power. There is absolutely required a 
synthesizer. In man, this is a self-conscious cen- 
ter, or soul; in the plants and animals, a sub- 
conscious center, or elemental. 

In the manifested cosmos there can be no excep- 
tion to this universal law of the synthesis of lower 
by higher entities. Worlds are but the garments 
of their chief rectors — garments composed of myr- 



100 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

iads of lower elemental hosts. Men are but units 
in a thinking body which we term humanity, and 
which, by all the laws of analogy, is synthesized in 
some grand, incomprehensible (to us) Hierarchial 
whole. That we do not realize this consciously, is 
because our consciousness is upon a plane so far be- 
neath that of the synthesizing host; just as the 
cells of our body, although so plainly an organism 
to our consciousness, are unable to comprehend that 
they are such an organism, or to conceive of the in- 
telligence which can use and direct a complex 
whole, formed of such countless and diverse units. 
It may be claimed that as all organisms develop 
from a germ or seed, herein is to be found 
the reason for the exact reproduction of form and 
conscious function. But this is one of those half- 
truths; dangerous because it is half true. The 
seed only furnishes the material element and basis 
for the reincarnating elemental or soul. And hav- 
ing within it of necessity certain cells which have 
never died since the first appearance of organic life 
upon this planet, these cells have the impress of 
previous form-associations upon them, and hence, 
when they are again revivified, the line of least re- 
sistance for the returning entity would be in the di- 
rection of, or tendency toward, the reproduction of 
the old form. But if this were the sole source of 
the reproduction of specific forms, then variation 
would be impossible. Exact reproduction of that 
form preserved in the records of the seed would be 



RE-EMBODIMENT OF THE SOUL 101 

inevitable, whereas variation is as much a law and 
a necessity in evolution as is its opposite. To ac- 
count for variation there must enter the higher 
conscious factor, exactly as the same factor must 
be postulated in the production of the very first 
cell or plant, which originated of necessity without 
the aid of any material seed. Sir William Thomp- 
son's hypothesis of seeds having been brought to 
the earth by some comet only removes the materi- 
alistic enigma to still more difficult grounds ; it 
does not solve it. It were wiser and infinitely more 
logical for all materialists to admit, with Haeckel, 
Huxley, Bain, and others, the fact of spontaneous 
generation, and face the problems involved in this 
fairly. Their unwillingness to do so is easily ex- 
plained, for, if admitted, it will be apparent that 
the conscious or spiritual factor must be recognized 
as at the base of any and all spontaneous genera- 
tion and evolution of form. Blind force taking the 
direction of the least resistance will not stand the 
light of logical analysis, for it neither could nor 
would take this direction were it blind. The power 
to recognize the line of least resistance is a con- 
scious one, and never was nor can be exercised un- 
consciously or blindly. 

It is thus seen how completely the law of the con- 
servation of force — necessarily conscious, though 
not necessarily ^/-conscious — and the facts of 
evolution establish the truth of reincarnation as an 
universal process in nature; and that the ebbing 



102 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

and flowing of force includes also the ebbing and 
flowing of consciousness, and explains the orderly 
appearance of an universe out of apparent noth- 
ingness. For that which appears to us as non- 
being is but the subjective arc of Being which 
equally with its objective arc is included in the 
complete circle and cycle of reincarnation. By the 
latter is also explained the appearance of any type 
of form-building by entities upon any plane of be- 
ing, whether that type be the ponderous mass of 
the elephant or the humble vestment of a lichen. 
For the spontaneous generation of the materialist 
is but the returning entity building for itself the 
form necessary for the objective arc of its exist- 
ence. Recognizing this, the seeming mysteries of 
both birth and death stand unveiled. They are but 
the objective and subjective arcs of the One Life, 
as expressed in the countless crores of (seemingly) 
separate existences. 

The truth of the first postulate being thus un- 
equivocally established, it only remains to examine 
the second, which is, that the human soul, thus in- 
dividualized, does reincarnate in successive bodies 
as a distinct, self-conscious center of conscious- 
ness. 

It has already been shown that the process of in- 
dividualizing centers of consciousness begins at the 
very dawn of differentiation ; that every experience 
in matter imposes a widening of conscious area and 
limitations as to the choice of material vehicles, 



RE-EMBODIMENT OF THE SOUL 103 

which gradually force not only a farther differen- 
tiation in its own kingdom but also compels the in- 
dividualized entity to at length seek a higher one. 
Therefore, it must not be supposed that in man 
alone there is specific reincarnation. Nature never 
leaps. The centers of consciousness, or elemental 
souls, in all the kingdoms below the human must 
reincarnate ; that is, each specific repetition of form 
in any kingdom is the reincarnation of an ele- 
mental center of consciousness which has received 
this definite stamp as the result of conscious expe- 
riences in its evolutionary past. Such centers do 
not have subjective cycles of the same nature as the 
human soul because they are below the plane of 
self-consciousness. Therefore, their subjective arcs 
are passed in latency — a bare potentiality of again 
manifesting the same form when their subjective 
arc is completed and environing conditions per- 
mit. That there is an actual re-clothing of the same 
entity, is proven by the repetition of the exact form, 
leafage and flowering of plants from roots, rhi- 
zomas or bulbs, for here the entity has plainly 
never abandoned its hold upon the material plane. 
So that when we speak of the reproduction of a 
plant from a dried, withered bulb as a growth, we 
are but hiding our ignorance of what has actually 
occurred behind technical phraseology. The plant 
has not been dead ; it has been living in this bulb, 
which gave no evidence of its presence, the subjec- 
tive arc of its life cycle. 



104 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

Similarly, in the metamorphosis of insects, a 
caterpillar, for instance, passes through a complete 
cycle of subjectivity to re-emerge as the same en- 
tity clothed in the same physical molecules — these 
having never been dispersed — but with entirely 
different form, functions and habits. If the inner, 
elemental force can bring about so complete and 
wonderful a change without abandoning the old 
material, it is sheer unreason not to recognize that, 
when the butterfly existence is ended, the same 
entity is amply able to rebuild the old caterpillar 
form from an egg after the close of the subjective 
arc between the butterfly and caterpillar stages. 

If, therefore, we find that throughout all the 
kingdoms below man there is a plain leading up to 
and preparation for self-conscious reincarnation ; 
that the self-conscious subjective arcs in the human 
kingdom are a natural sequence and corollary of 
sub-conscious or latent arcs in the lower ones ; and 
further, that reincarnation is the process of evo- 
lution, we may assume this as a reasonable 
working hypothesis in explanation of the phenom- 
ena of human existence. And, logically, if we 
show the absolute necessity for the presence of a 
certain law in the cosmos in order to rationalize 
otherwise inexplicable phenomena, we prove the 
existence [of that law, although we may not fully 
comprehend its real nature nor mode of operation. 
Thus, ether has never been demonstrated other than 
by the necessity for such a medium in order to ex- 



RE-EMBODIMENT OF THE SOUL 105 

plain certain natural phenomena, yet no one doubts 
nor disputes its existence. Similarly, if, as has been 
pointed out, we find that every process in nature 
tends toward and leads up to the rebirth of indiv- 
idualized human souls, we have a scientific right to 
assume that rebirth or reincarnation is a natural 
and therefore universal law. And if we further 
find that in the human kingdom itself there are 
numerous phenomena which can only be explained 
by such a law, its existence passes into the domain 
of certitude and exact knowledge ; while if we still 
further find that the very highest and most philo- 
sophic conceptions of life and of the universe re- 
quire it ; if the grandest generalizations of modern 
science, the conservation of force, the indestructi- 
bility of matter, and the process of evolution, de- 
mand it, we shall be but blind followers, not lead- 
ers, of the blind, if we do not accept the divine 
truth which it reveals. « 

A brief examination of some of these phenomena, 
as well as philosophic categories, which require re- 
incarnation in order to explain them, will consti- 
tute the remaining portion of this chapter. 

All of the higher mental, psyhic and spiritual 
phenomena are utterly unexplained except by re- 
incarnation. Among these we may note the sud- 
den appearance of a genius in an entirely mediocre 
family; a Shakespeare, rising out of the muddy 
stream of a Warwickshire tenant-farming and 
petty-trading family. Then will appear a mathe- 



106 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

matical prodigy, such as Zera Colburn among Mis- 
souri clodhoppers ; a musical wonder, a blind Tom, 
out of ignorant, slave parentage; a Napoleon, bred 
from a camp follower, and so on, ad infinitum. No 
possible theory limited by one life can explain 
these. But if we recognize reincarnation we at once 
see that each instance is but the pursuing of a line 
of development by an ego who has already brought 
this particular line to a wonderful perfection in 
preceding lives. And the obverse of these instances 
is equally explainable by reincarnation. Mental 
inferiority ; stupid sons of wise or illustrious par- 
ents, are impossible to account for under the law 
of physical heredity, to which, of course, false 
science would relegate them. True science con- 
fesses its inability, except to vaguely conjecture 
that atavism may be the agent. But atavism itself 
can not be explained except by reincarnation. 
Under physical law, any force must diminish ac- 
cording to definite ratios when disconnected with 
its original impulse, and atavism plainly flies in 
the face of this law, if it be a reversion to a remote 
ancestor. Reincarnation shows that atavism is but 
a soul returning with tendencies so strongly im- 
pressed upon the eternal cell (transmitted from 
parent to offspring physically) by some remote an- 
cestor that this ancestor is copied rather than the 
nearer ones. Many of these cases of atavism, es- 
pecially in this selfish age of violence, may be the 
actual return of the same ego, in which case the 



RE-EMBODIMENT OF THE SOUL 107 

tendency to reproduce the old form and traits 
would be almost irresistible. 

And if we enter the domain of logic and philoso- 
phy, we are, if possible, in still greater perplexity 
unless we accept reincarnation. Immortality posi- 
tively demands it ; justice absolutely requires it. 
The inequalities of birth, of racial, national and 
social environments, represent a chaos of injustice 
unless explained by it. Even if we were to accept 
the theory of physical heredity as accounting for 
one child having a vicious and another a lovable 
disposition, one a highly intellectual, and another 
a stupid, animal nature, we are still unable to ac- 
count for the terrible injustice which sends one soul 
to vicious, another to virtuous parents ; one to cul- 
tured Aryans, another to African Bushmen, with- 
out the unfortunate or fortunate souls having any 
choice in the matter. Either we must accept the 
reincarnation of souls who have lived such lives as 
have unavoidably attracted them, under the law of 
cause and effect, to the black or the white, the vir- 
tuous or the vicious parents, or we must admit that 
the universe is but a chapter of accidents ; or, if 
designed and controlled by a god, then that god 
must be at heart a careless, indifferent monster. 

There are absolutely no two individuals in the 
world whose social station, character, and intellect- 
ual capacities have been the same from birth. This 
inequality, thus attending the very entrance of the 
soul upon this sphere of action, must be justly and 



108 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

logically accounted for by any religion or philoso- 
phy before the latter is entitled to the slightest 
consideration or respect. It is in their foolish and 
puerile attempts to account for original sin, and the 
presence of evil as a most patent and potent factor 
in the world, that all one-birth religious and phil- 
osophic theories break hopelessly down. But if we 
recognize in the soul a pilgrim through the great 
Cycle of Necessity, starting pure but undeveloped, 
and having to develope all its powers and faculties 
through use alone, we have at once in our hands 
the thread of Ariadne ; the clue which shall guide 
us safely out of the labyrinths of evil in which we 
have become entangled during our endeavors to slay 
the monster, ignorance. For a perfect knowledge of 
earth-states requires that each man undergo every 
possible experience ; subdue every variety of hu- 
man passion; resist every form of temptation 
whether of the physical, emotional or intellectual. 
Only by reincarnation is it possible to do this ; to 
round out and develope patience, fortitude, pity, 
charity, benevolence, and a host of god-like attri- 
butes ; all of which have to be refined out of the 
crucible of actual experience and suffering. One 
life is all too short for the lessons of sympathy and 
love we have to learn, ere we develop compassion 
for the woes of others from the fires of our own 
purification, from the ashes of our sacrificed pas- 
sions. 

But reincarnation affords ample opportunity for 



RE-EMBODIMENT OF THE SOUL 109 

even infinite progression, and contemplates man as 
eventually becoming a god compared to his present 
position and powers, while before him still lie vis- 
tas, eternal, indescribable, incomprehensible ! 

Yet it is not by soaring into dreamy conjectures 
of the future that this philosophy finds its highest 
usefulness, but rather because it solves the present, 
every-day problems of life. It removes all injus- 
tice, all chance and all accident from every human 
environment. Acting under the universal law of 
cause and effect it determines inexorably every cir- 
cumstance that foolish philosophers and more fool- 
ish theologians call the accidents of birth. As has 
been stated, a soul is born to vicious or virtuous 
parents, to black or white ones, with capacities 
which cause it to become wise or foolish, rich or 
poor, through endless diversities of circumstance 
and seeming accident, because it has created in 
former lives that character which causes it to seek 
race, nation, and parent, under the law of cause 
and effect, as surely as atoms of oxygen and hydro- 
gen seek each other in the crucibles of nature to 
form water. The law is absolute ; like is attracted 
to like; similar causes produce similar results. 
Even the very diseases of men are karmic inherit- 
ances through reincarnation by means of diseased 
parents having presented the line of least resist- 
ance or greatest attraction. The insane, the epi- 
leptic, the hunchback, the consumptive, would not 
— could not — come to parents having these taints 



110 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

in their blood had they not deserved to be born 
under such conditions by acts done and tendencies 
originated in former lives. There is no chance; 
there is no chaos ; above all, there is no revengeful 
Deity controlling man's circumstances or destiny 
and "cursing him even unto the fifth generation.'' 
Man is his own arbiter, judge, executioner. Under 
the law of cause and effect — to which men and 
gods alike must bow — he works out his own sal- 
vation or perdition. Every act, thought or word 
is a cause which modifies his nature to some ex- 
tent and, taken together, form that character and 
those affinities which determine absolutely, without 
the possibility of interference, his every position 
and power in his next life. No cruel fate nor blind 
chance has been the slightest factor in the produc- 
tion of any evil or any blessing which now makes 
earth a heaven or hell to him. 

How can any one-birth theory, from the stand- 
point of justice, account for those born diseased, 
blind, deformed, idiotic ? Such theories offer only 
chance, or the whim of some imaginary god, in 
explanation of these seeming injustices. The mind 
revolts against such puerile absurdity. If chance 
can rule in one single instance, then the universe is 
all chance, and he who can get the better of his 
brother by robbery, or even murder, is amply justi- 
fied, for we are then but cattle driven helplessly to 
the slaughter. But, realizing that we have lived on 
this earth in the past, and shall do so in the future, 



RE-EMBODIMENT OF THE SOUL 111 

with every life controlled by the acts of former ones, 
even selfishness prompts us to pursue a line of con- 
duct which shall send us into pleasant and happy 
environments in future incarnations. 

Yet, as reincarnation teaches the truth that we 
are absolutely dependent upon the function of par- 
entage for our ability to return here when this be- 
comes inevitable under the law, it is at once appar- 
ent how intimate is the bond which unites all souls 
in a common brotherhood. One can not soar away 
from the rest ; he must use a body furnished by 
physical parents, and the wisest and most evolved 
soul will find his wings crippled, his powers limit- 
ed, if he be compelled to seek reincarnation through 
inferior physical progenitors. He is thus violently 
thrown back to partake in the common lot, to share 
in the suffering he has selfishly tried to avoid. 
Only by raising the whole of humanity is it possible 
for its egos to make real and permanent progress. 
Thus reincarnation, even from the physical stand- 
poins, re-enforces and re-declares the law of the 
brotherhood of man ; the law of his very highest 
being as well as his lowest, and in which is to be 
found his only hope of attainment to the elysian 
fields of the gods. 

We see, then, true philosophy, true science and 
true religion, all requiring reincarnation to meet 
their demands ; that innumerable phenomena upon 
every plane of nature are alone explicable by it ; 
that it satisfies the heart and intellect alike. Let 



112 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

us, therefore, if we be men and not babes afraid of 
our own shadows, accept it, and, accepting it, so 
live that humanity will one day have progressed 
until incarnation in these mortal bodies upon this 
plane of illusion will no longer be necessary. 



CHAPTER XIII 



THE NATURE OF THE SOUL 



THE soul is a unit of consciousness. But what 
is consciousness ? The universe, including 
man, must have a source. This source may- 
be termed God, or the Absolute, or the Unknow- 
able, as one chooses. It is of necessity infinite ; and 
that which is finite can not comprehend the infin- 
ite. But the infinite can not be out of all relation 
to the finite, for the finite depends upon the infinite 
for its existence; and, therefore, the Unknowable 
must present to the finite certain aspects of itself 
which are comprehensible. These aspects are mat- 
ter, force and consciousness. Consciousness is that 
aspect of the Absolute which perceives, reasons, 
feels, wills, and directs. Neither matter, nor force, 
possess any of these discriminating powers ; there- 
fore consciousness appears to be the superior of the 
three. 

Man's body, in common with the entire universe 
(for the universe is but embodied consciousness), is 
governed from within outward. Every thought 
which enters the human brain comes into it ready- 
made; every motion of which the human body 
is capable arises through some inner impulse. 



114 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

Inner control is universal and absolute. The fact 
that the universe is governed from within outward 
is evidenced by the appearance or design every- 
where. Theological assumptions and assertions 
have caused this argument of design to become 
somewhat discredited. Theology teaches that an 
anthropomorphic God created the universe, and 
governs it solely by his personal, and, therefore, 
mutable, will. But certain laws of nature were 
recognized which transcend the possibilities of an- 
thropomorphic divinity, and blind force, taking the 
direction of least resistance, displaced and en- 
deavored to discredit the view of design. If one 
takes the larger view that everything in the uni- 
verse is governed from within without, the argu- 
ment of design holds good, and proves that there is 
within the cosmos that which designs in advance 
of execution ; and this is consciousness. 

Material laws themselves are only the evidence 
of a broader, deeper designing. They show that 
there are beings as far in advance of ourselves as 
we are apparently in advance of the flower or the 
insect ; beings whose thought takes form in mate- 
rial worlds and in the forms of entities which in- 
habit them ; whose will is seen in the laws which 
govern such worlds. In short, if there were not 
this inner consciousness, designing, guiding, con- 
trolling everything, then this universe would be but 
chaos. 

Matter is incapable of self-guidance. Of itself, 



NATURE OF THE SOUL 115 

it is inert and lifeless. Force, of itself, is non-intel- 
ligent ; for even the laws of nature which are the 
wills of high, divine beings, in their mere action 
show themselves to be mechanical. An earthquake 
does not choose its victims ; a hurricane does not 
avoid certain localities and devastate others, for 
these are but examples of general laws under 
which the entire world exists ; and in any specific 
case are necessarily non-intelligent. 

Consciousness and matter are ever associated 
and force is but an expression of the effect of con- 
sciousness acting in matter. Yet matter ever lim- 
its consciousness; prevents it from exhibiting all 
its powers. The more dense the matter, the less the 
consciousness which can be displayed. This is im- 
portant to remember. We do not know what con- 
sciousness is in itself. We do not know that it can 
even exist without a material association. Cer- 
tainly, there is no evidence of such existence in the 
manifested universe, and with unmanifested realms 
we have no present concern. Therefore, in its ma- 
terial associations we may expect to find infinite 
gradations of the manifestations of consciousness, 
for the infinite can only manifest itself finitely by 
an infinite number or succession of finite phe- 
nomena. 

For convenience of study, consciousness may be 
divided into the mineral, vegetable, animal and 
human kingdoms. In the mineral and vegetable 
kingdoms there is no appearance of the Not-me, 



116 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

no self-differentiation is possible. But both these 
states are throbbing with the consciousness of life, 
which, as yet, is in the universal. In the animal 
kingdom the Not-me is faintly dawning ; in the 
human it appears as an I-am-myself, which separ- 
ates itself from the universe without. This recog- 
nition of egoity is a possibility in all states of con- 
sciousness. It does not appear in the lower king- 
doms because it is prevented from manifesting by 
the density or materiality of the vehicle; but it is 
there as a potentiality. 

But what is egohood — this mysterious power of 
self-recognition as I-am-I ? It roots in the Abso- 
lute — is lost in that "pavilion which is surrounded 
by darkness.'' Out of Absolute Unity all mani- 
fested differentiation of necessity proceeds. It is evi- 
dent that this unity is manifesting itself in an infi- 
nite number of units of consciousness, every unit of 
which is capable through the process of involution 
and evolution, of manifesting all potentialities con- 
tained in its Source. Every phenomenon of the 
manifested universe, all evolution in nature, dem- 
onstrates that atomic units of consciousness are 
passing through some great Cycle of Necessity, and 
so widening infinite potentiality into actual potency. 
This is the meaning of, and the reason for, the pro- 
cess of evolution. 

The soul, then, is a unit of consciousness. But 
unity, by its very nature, is incomprehensible. 
What says mathematics, the most exact of all 



NATURE OF THE SOUL 117 

science, of the unit? Once one is — what? Two? 
No; once one is onel One divided by one is — 
what ? A half of one ? No ; one divided by 
one is still one ! Is there not herein a great mys- 
tery ? One added to one makes two ; one subtract- 
ed from one leaves nothing. We can add units of 
consciousness together, until out of them we have 
an infinite universe, but to multiply them or divide 
them, or, in other words, to produce them out of 
each other is impossible. The soul remains forever 
a unit, uncreate and immutable. 

Unity, thus seen to dwell in matter, enters also 
into consciousness ; for matter, force, and conscious- 
ness are inseparable. Unity in one demonstrates it 
in all, so that, mathematically, we are forced to 
recognize a unit of consciousness or a soul. 

There is no science which is not built upon 
unity ; which does not depend upon units for its 
existence. Mathematics, physics, chemistry, astron- 
omy, all are based upon this mysterious unity, this 
atom which must be postulated before the demon- 
stration of any science whatever. Material atoms 
must exist that the universe may exist ; conscious 
atoms must exist, that differentiated consciousness, 
or souls, may exist. 

The soul, then, is a conscious unit, or a unit of 
consciousness. It must be a unit because it can 
cognize or know unity. It is not possible for the 
soul to conceive of a quality which it does not pos- 
sess. Can the stone or the flower think of itself as 



118 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

I? But man — all his thoughts, his emotions, his 
passions, his will, everything which constitutes him 
man, every faculty of his soul, depends for its ex- 
istence upon this recognition of I-am-myself, this 
unit of consciousness upon which has at length 
dawned the first, faint, reflection of that infinite, 
eternal unity in which it has it source and which it 
IS. It is, therefore, a self-evident truth that the 
soul is a unit because it perceives unity. 

The soul is a unit, also, because it conserves con- 
scious experiences. The acorn brings forth oaks ; 
and throughout the eternities it will produce but 
oaks so long as this unit of consciousness seeks and 
finds expression within the vegetable kingdom. In 
the human soul, identity is equally evident. Each 
soul has a multitude of conscious experiences, in- 
volving the production of conscious energy. The 
law of the conservation of energy is universal; 
and no soul can conserve the conscious experiences 
of another. Whatever conscious experiences one 
has can be recorded only upon his own soul ; not 
upon that of another, and therefore, this record 
can not be made, preserved, nor conserved, unless 
the soul is an indestructible, eternal unit of con- 
ness. 

The soul is a unit, also, because it can perceive 
itself. Can the flower perceive itself ? Does the 
rock recognize that it is a rock ? But the human 
soul recognizes unity, which is but itself, yet being 
still under the sway of the the illusion of matter 



NATURE OF THE SOUL 119 

separates itself from its source and, therefore, from 
all other units, which is the Great Illusion. This 
recognition of I-am-I is born with the human soul, 
and is just as strong in the cradle as it is at the 
very threshold of the grave. All through life it is 
the one thing which ever persists ; which is never 
lost. With its very first expression of conscious- 
ness, the child exclaims, " I-am-myself ." With its 
last breath it makes the same assertion. All the 
wilderness of change, all the phenomena of mental 
growth, of conscious expansion, have not altered in 
one iota that innate recognition of unity which pro- 
claims, "I-am-myself-and-none-other !" 

The soul is a unit of consciousness because it re- 
members its past. Memory implies a stable, sure, 
permanent record, upon which experiences are en- 
graved, or the soul could not recall them. Each 
one remembers his past — not another's. And it 
would be impossible for us to remember any past if 
the soul were not a unit, eternal and immutable. 
The brain is a molecular, mechanical apparatus. 
Its molecules are coming and going incessantly. 
Seven years, we are taught, is sufficient to complete 
the change of the very hardest bone ; seven hours, 
perhaps, may completely change the entire brain 
substance. Certainly, it changes with great ra- 
pidity. The material tablet upon which an event 
is recorded is destroyed and renewed scores of times, 
yet throughout all memory persists — a thing im- 
possible if there were not an unchanging unit of 



120 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

consciousness, upon which all conscious experi- 
ences are recorded, and which the phenomena of 
memory proves to exist and to be beyond the do- 
main of decay or chance. 

The soul is a unit because it synthesizes all the 
various reports of the senses. The hand feels a 
thing. The sense of sight reports a thing quite 
different. If there were not that within which 
takes these two reports — that conveyed by touch, 
and that recorded by sight — and harmonizes and 
synthesizes them, what would the world be but 
chaos and unreality? These every-day experiences, 
these things which are necessary to our lives hour 
by hour and moment by moment, prove beyond 
question the existence of the soul and its unity; 
if we only patiently observe and reason upon 
them. 

The soul is a unit of consciousness, then, and it 
is independent of the body. The body is destroyed 
almost entirely by old age, or by sickness ; yet, if 
the person has cultivated his reasoning powers, 
does old age dim them ? It does not ; it only weak- 
ens the reasoning powers of those who have lived 
as vegetables. The man who has lived a life of 
thought takes the power of thought to the grave 
with him. It can not be destroyed. The body 
may be emaciated by disease, yet the soul will 
reason the more acutely because of this suppres- 
sion of the merely animal portion of man. There 
are many diseases which suspend consciousness, 



NATURE OF THE SOUL 121 

but this is because they impair its principal ve- 
hicle, the brain. But, setting this aside, there are 
numberless instances of disease which destroy the 
body without impairing consciousness. Old age it- 
self never impairs the consciousness of that soul 
which has compelled its brain to think. 

The universal belief in a soul is not evidence ; it 
is only testimony. Yet, when almost the entire 
world accepts a thing, may we not believe that the 
idea is innate, and innate because it is true ; that 
the soul recognizes its truth, even though it be har- 
assed and limited by matter, and asserts from its 
own nature the truth which it thus intuitively rec- 
ognizes ? 

It is not demanded that the soul be placed as a 
material thing in evidence. In one aspect it is 
material, but its matter can not be seen, touched 
or tasted. In consciousness itself must be sought 
the proof of consciousness. 

Materialists may declare, "You have never seen 
a soul." Let us answer, "You have never seen a 
body." A flux and flow of atoms, streaming in 
and out by millions, never for the thousandth of 
an instant the same, is more unreal than the soul. 
The soul is not an object of physical perception; 
but of spiritual, or conscious, recognition. 

Logic and philosophy, on the one hand, agree 
with the phenomena of life, on the other, in de- 
claring that man is a soul, and not the mere lump 
of clay which chains him to the earth. It is the 



122 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

body alone, with its desires and passions, which 
separates us from each other, not the soul within, 
which, when it can make itself heard, always de- 
clares its unity — its brotherhood — with all other 
souls. This feeling of brotherhood has a deep sig- 
nificance, for it is the mute testimony of the soul to 
the common origin of all souls — the recognition of 
a divine Unity, in which all have their source and 
life. So, recognizing that man is a soul, an eter- 
nal, imperishable center of consciousness, which 
life or death affects not, except to change its tem- 
porary vestments, each can press forward toward 
the goal of his own god-like destiny ; each can face 
the gates of death undaunted; for life in the cycles 
of time will bring us again and again to its portals 
for the unfolding of that divine nature, now so 
deeply buried in the coils of matter. So let us set 
ourselves earnestly to seek the meaning of our so- 
journ in these bodies of clay, not foolishly declar- 
ing the sensuous experiences of the body to be all 
there is of life. Nothing can come to us but our 
own, whether of joy or sorrow; for the Galilean 
Adept stated the whole law of life when he de- 
clared: "Brethren, be not deceived; God is not 
mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he 
also reap." 



CHAPTER XIV 

CAN THE DEAD COMMUNICATE? 

THIS question can only be answered after a 
thorough examination of the constitution of 
the mortal man. For, after all, the question 
is not so much, Can the real ego communicate ? as, 
Can the last personality communicate ? 

We want to hear from our dead as they were 
when we knew them. Anything which is new or 
strange is something to which we strenuously ob- 
ject. "What is the use," we ask, "of communica- 
ting unless it is with the personality we knew and 
loved ?" So the whole question, from its spiritual- 
istic aspect resolves itself into an eager search for 
tests that the communication is genuine, and really 
from the personality from whom it claims to eman- 
ate. How satisfactory this has proven, is shown 
by the fact that the life-long, veteran spiritualist is 
just as eager for new and more satisfactory tests 
to-day as he was a half-century since, when he be- 
gan investigating. This condition could not ob- 
tain if the tests were really as satisfactory as the 
advocates of this philosophy would have us be- 
lieve. We must first of all realize that the soul is a 
center of consciousness — a unity representing that 



124 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

great Unity of which the cosmos is an adumbra- 
tion. It eludes analysis — is as incapable of com- 
prehension as the Absolute itself. Like the latter, 
its nature can only be conjectured from the phe- 
nomena which it causes, and which betray its in- 
dwelling. Thus it is a unit because it perceives 
and comprehends unity and postulates it of things 
outside itself — an impossibility did it not possess 
unity as an attribute of itself, as has been well 
shown by Professor Ladd and others.* It has also 
the elements of pity, compassion, love, unselfish- 
ness, with many other divine qualities, because it 
feels these things. The opposites of these, as hatred, 
revenge, selfishness, etc., do not inhere in its true 
essence because it constantly rejects them — tries 
eternally to purge these things from its conscious- 
ness. They can, therefore, be but perversions, finite 
and temporary, of truly divine qualities. No one 
desires to hate unless under the sway of selfishness 
and ignorance — and ignorance is the source of all 
selfishness. 

This divine, incomprehensible center and unit of 
consciousness manifests itself upon the finite side 
of existence by means of so-called material ve- 
hicles, although these vehicles are themselves the 
seat of the consciousness of entities at different 
stages, and traversing differing arcs, of the infinite- 
ly varied cycles of evolution. Coming from the 
Absolute, as it must, and manifesting upon this 

* Elements of Psychological Physiology. 



CAN THE DEAD COMMUNICATE? 125 

outer, material rim of the cosmos, as it undoubted- 
ly does, it follows as a logical and partially dem- 
onstrable proposition, that the soul has an almost 
infinitely compound vehicle, which ranges from the 
coarse molecules of which our bodies are composed 
to matter which not only eludes analysis, but 
baffles comprehension in its fineness, tenuity, and 
above all, its potentialities of conscious manifesta- 
tion, or of permitting the evolution of the soul 
through undreamed-of fields of conscious experi- 
ences. This matter also proceeds from unity, and, 
because of this, there are no hard and fast lines 
dividing this compound vehicle into so many lay- 
ers, or skins, like those of an onion, for example. 
A knowledge of this fact must follow -us through all 
our investigations, and will enable us to extricate 
ourselves from many an otherwise insuperable dif- 
ficulty. In it is to be found the only solution to 
the question under consideration. 

For, while not separating like the skins of an 
onion, there are certain lines of cleavage — certain 
weak or critical states of matter, which, because 
partaking of the nature of the states both above 
and below, are not so strong as either of these, and 
therefore afford normal lines of separation. It is 
these lines of cleavage which, from their material 
aspect, mark the divisions known in Theosophical 
philosophy as the Seven Principles. But as 
each state or principle passes by insensible grada- 
tions into the state or principle above or below, the 



126 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

separation, at first, is never complete, either me- 
chanically or consciously. Time — that universal 
factor in all the phenomena of finite manifestation 
— is required to complete the separation. 

Thus, the soul which dies out of its physical body 
has still enough remnants of molecular matter to 
enable it to dimly sense the things of earth, though 
not enough to enable the man of earth to sense its 
presence except under very exceptional conditions. 
This power is quite faint in normal deaths — but 
who dies normally? Not one in a million, perhaps. 
We are so ignorant of the laws of the plane upon 
which we are struggling to maintain our existence 
that practically none conform to them exactly (an 
absolute necessity if our stay here is to prove nor- 
mal), and so has arisen that abnormal state of con- 
sciousness known among Theosophists as kama- 
loka, and among Catholics, though wholly misun- 
derstood, as purgatory. 

This is not to be wondered at. With religious 
concepts which would almost be dignified if classed 
as superstitions; with ideals based wholly upon 
erroneous conceptions of life ; with our whole na- 
ture tending earthward and longing for the things 
of earth ; with our mutilated lives cut short while 
our desires are still unsatisfied, it is small wonder, 
indeed, that the soul is unable to rest after death. 
So it has widened a normally narrow critical con- 
dition into a deep and yawning gulf, out of which 
it can not be prayed, and of whose unrealities it 



CAN THE DEAD COMMUNICATE? 127 

must become utterly weary before it can cross to 
the safe shores of temporary oblivion — of sleep 
and dream. 

From this purgatory the PERSONALITY can 
under exceptional conditions, communicate. That 
is to say, the person as we knew him, the man of 
earth, through the creative power of his imagina- 
tion, builds for himself a faint, and ordinarily in- 
visible, replica of his physical body from matter of 
a molecular nature which still clings to his disem- 
bodied soul, by means of which he maintains a 
faint and exceedingly temporary hold upon ma- 
terial things. Such a soul coming in contact with 
a medium or person with a diseased and, therefore, 
abnormally sensitive astral body, can undoubtedly 
make its identity known. The communication is 
fleeting and unsatisfactory to all concerned, both 
to the disembodied entities and to those in the 
flesh ; but it can be accomplished. Under exceed- 
ingly abnormal conditions the personality can 
even materialize and become visible to the physi- 
cal eyes of any one. These abnormal conditions 
are largely the coming together of personalities 
from both sides of the grave, each imbued with an 
intense desire to manifest, one or more of them 
being a medium, or person with an abnormally 
developed and sensitive astral body, and an ac- 
quired tendency for it to " ooze out." Now let the 
light be so dim as not to disintegrate the form, 
and the "spook" may so clothe itself with the 



128 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

medium's astral shape as to become plainly visible. 
But it is rarely, if ever, that those who claim to be 
dead relatives, etc., really are such. The audiences 
are usually so self-hypnotized, so self-deluded by 
their intense desire for abnormal phenomena, that 
the same spook will often impersonate a host of the 
"dear departed." Or, the thought of some strong 
will present may actually mold the astral matter, 
unconsciously to himself, into the resemblance 
stamped by affection upon his memory. Besides, 
the spooks who can return in this way are the very 
lowest and most material of all. Lost souls, or 
those from whom the reincarnating ego has depart- 
ed, and whose very existence depends upon their 
being able to prey like vampires upon the foolish 
living, are often to be found among them. Mate- 
rialization is wholly abnormal and uncanny, and 
so many influences are at work in its production 
that its modus operandum is hard to unravel. As a 
proof that there is some sort of existence beyond 
the grave, although this be extremely undesirable, 
it is of some doubtful value ; as a means, or proof 
of, communication with the dead, it is utterly val- 
ueless. Probably nine hundred and ninety-nine of 
every thousand alleged materializations are fraudu- 
lent and impudent impositions upon the credulity 
of those present, and from the few spooks who do 
maintain an uncertain existence for a few moments 
upon this, to them, abnormal plane, nothing of 
value ever did come, or, from the very nature of the 



CAN THE DEAD COMMUNICATE? 129 

circumstances, ever can come. Such phenomena 
may confound the gross materialist, but here use- 
fulness ends, and it is an exceedingly doubtful 
question if the whole game is worth the candle. 

The communication by the dead through the 
senses must always be attended with great diffi- 
culty, owing to the exceedingly imperfect sense or- 
gans which remain for a brief period after the 
death of the body. Yet it is just this sensuous 
communication which the sensuous man demands. 
He must see and hear and feel the ghost — must 
thrust his hand into the wounded side, before he 
will believe. With his own senses dulled by the 
grossness of his desires, and with the faintest re- 
plica of sense-organs remaining in the case of the 
dead, it is small wonder that the persistent search 
after tests is so futile And this remaining re- 
plica is the more marked as the soul is more gross, 
whence it is easy to see that the most bestial men 
when living are exactly those who can communi- 
cate the most easily when dead. 

This is not an idle assertion, but one capable of 
scientific demonstration. Matter is not the dead 
thing which our materialists would have us be- 
lieve. It is always associated with consciousness 
of some degree, and this associated conscious- 
ness really determines the plane to which it be- 
longs. Thus in the case of a normal line of divis- 
ion between two states of matter, already referred 
to, it is plain that the thought of the individual 



130 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

will largely determine the exact line of cleavage. 
Physical matter passes by imperceptible degrees 
into the finer matter of the next higher plane. 
Coarse desires and low thoughts will so taint the 
consciousness of the cells along this critical line 
that they will divide much lower down than is the 
case in one whose thoughts and desires were high, 
and thus a stratum of tainted matter, which ought 
to have remained with the body and to have per- 
ished with it, remains as a basis for the astral 
senses of the sensuous entity. Such vicious and 
sin-tainted souls will naturally cling to the only 
consciousness which appeals to them. They will 
seek the things of earth with a passionate longing. 
A lie more or less counts for nothing with them, if 
it enables them to partake vicariously, even for a 
few minutes, of the lost pleasures of earth. The 
fleshpots of Egypt are sweet to their palates, and 
personification of the dead relative of a credulous 
dupe wonderfully easy. 

It will thus be seen that sensuous messages, or 
those which come through the avenues of the 
senses, are as unreliable and, therefore, as useless 
as are materializations. Occasionally, and under 
exceptional circumstances (a pure, unselfish and 
spiritually minded medium is absolutely essential), 
a genuine message may drift through while the de- 
parted soul is yet in the borderland and held to 
earth by the ties of a strong personal affection. 
But for all except the vicious and depraved there is 



CAN THE DEAD COMMUNICATE? 131 

ample reason for believing that this borderland is 
swiftly crossed, and that the soul begins to live in 
its imagination within a few minutes, even, of 
death. Note the case of the physician, referred to 
heretofore. 

But there is a means of communicating with the 
dead, as well as with the living, ever at hand. This 
is through the higher faculties of the soul, and 
these are equally active in life or death. Con- 
sciousness is vibration, and the consciousness of 
love crosses all gulfs. The soul, embodied or dis- 
embodied, knows no higher vibration than that 
aroused and created by the feeling of pure love. 
There is nothing molecular in it — it roots in the 
very Absolute itself. It may be speechless — for 
who can find words to express even sense-tainted 
compassion and pity? — but it is able to reach the 
consciousness of the soul on both sides of the 
grave. Else who could endure the sorrow of death's 
awful separations ? Entire annihilation of the 
soul, total oblivion, forever and ever, would be far 
preferable to the chasm between us and our be- 
loved were this as real as our deluded senses would 
have us believe. The comforting consciousness, the 
evidence of the real presence of disembodied souls 
through their uninterrupted love and sympathy, 
enable us all to dry our tears, while we won- 
der, perhaps, why our grief will not stay. For it 
is only selfish and sensuous souls who sink into the 
depth of their very lowest sense-consciousness, and 



132 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

refuse to listen to the tender assurances of the 
higher and true Self. Such grieve because they are 
selfish, and the luxury of their grief affords them 
for the present the very highest pleasure, however 
much they would affect to be shocked if they were 
told the truth. In fact, all the emotions of the 
lower self — anger, hatred, pouting, or sulking, etc., 
are always indulged in because the lower and, for 
the time, dominant self finds in them its present 
highest satisfaction — is actually taking pleasure in 
them! 

Not only these high and holy feelings, which lie 
at the very base of our being, but high, pure, 
and ud selfish thoughts, also cross the Bridge of 
Sighs which seems to divide the two worlds of life 
and death. The inspirations of the poet, the art- 
ist, the musician — who can tell their exact source? 
Similarly, messages of hope, of encouragement in 
days of difficulty, may come from either side of the 
grave. They are the truest communications, for 
they assure us that we are not alone nor forgotten 
by gods or men in this awful, lonely sense-school, 
in which we are now striving to learn the meaning 
of life. The dramatizing power of the untram- 
meled imagination of the disembodied soul may 
even construct a guard of protecting entities around 
the beloved one who still remains in the darkness 
of the rlesh. The cases of premonitions, of warn- 
ings of danger, are much too numerous to be all 
due to blind chance. They show a protecting love 



CAN THE DEAD COMMUNICATE? 133 

which may well come from those whom we have 
dearly loved, but who have passed to the subjective 
side of the cycle of life. But here we enter a land 
of shadows and mystery which it is not our present 
purpose to explore. 

But, let it be repeated and emphasized, the com- 
munications from the " summerland " of Spiritual- 
ism are from the personalities of the dead, and are 
strong and decided in exact proportion to the 
earthly tendencies of those personalities. The true 
soul, the real being whom we loved through, per- 
haps, a long life of changing form, never communi- 
cates except from its own higher plane, and in the 
manner indicated. It is the astral corpse, the un- 
canny remains of the lower nature, that haunts 
mediums, and seeks to renew and re-experience the 
old sensuous delights. Such communications are 
as valueless and unreal as would be the utterances 
of a physical corpse galvanized into a semblance 
of life by electrical or other means. 

These communications usher their participants 
into the company of those with whom they would 
scorn to associate if they were embodied, but whose 
foul embraces are now considered holy because of 
the apparent mystery which accompanies their 
manifestation. Lost souls, murderers, suicides, In- 
dians, and the undeveloped and vicious generally, 
are the chosen friends of reverential test-seekers. 
Like causes produce like effects, and spiritualistic 
phenomena would not be surrounded by that 



134 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

aura of deceit and trickery, did they proceed from 
the souls of our pure and virtuous dead. 

Besides, all that any spook can accomplish in 
the way of communications alleged to come from 
beyond the grave, and supposed to be verified by 
exhibiting a knowledge of occurrences known only 
to the questioner, may be, and have often been, du- 
plicated by thought transference, without any at- 
attempt to interject the wholly unnecessary and 
clumsy artifice of a dead personality. When the 
wondrous powers of the human soul are developed 
and recognized, spooks as aid-de-camps will no 
longer be tolerated. That large class of phenom- 
ena which cluster around the borderland between 
life in the body and life beyond the grave, will 
then be understood, and the vagaries of modern 
Spiritualism will cease to be a reproach to the in- 
telligence of the West. 

Some day we will have progressed so far that we 
will recognize all souls as brothers, and will cease 
to demand that our own dead shall return to com- 
fort us. But then the chasm of seeming death will 
have been wholly bridged, for we will have learned 
our lesson — that brotherhood is the basis of being. 



CHAPTER XV 



THE HOME OF THE SOUL 



A STUDY of the nature of the soul, and the 
relation it bears to the body, even as brief 
and fragmentary as has been possible in 
this brochure, makes it abundantly clear that this 
molecular earth is not its permanent home. Upon 
what blissful realms of cosmos it has its abiding 
place, we can only conjecture. Confused by the 
roar of the senses, with the memory of its past 
deadened, it wanders in this phenomenal universe 
of coarse, uncongenial matter, a pale ghost of its 
true self ; believing itself too of ten^ to be but the 
animal body with which it is transiently asso- 
ciated. 

There is no suffering without adequate recom- 
pense — even this crude earth is governed by the 
law of cause and effect — and so the reward of the 
faithful soul for its toils while in the flesh must be 
as bright and hopeful as its condition now is dark 
and doubtful. 

The soul has no passions, no appetites, no 
hatreds, no fears, no doubts, no despairings. All 
these belong to, or are born from, the purely physi- 
cal man. Let the soul be freed from its body, and 



136 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

these fall away from it as the slime from the lotus 
that has thrust its petals above the stagnant pool. 
The faculties of the soul, as we have seen, are pity, 
compassion, love, unselfishness, the delights of pure 
wisdom, the contemplation of the beautiful and 
true, the intelligent seeking after God ! Creative 
geometry! (What unexplored domains await our 
god-like activities in this department of nature 
alone !) "God geometrizes," declares Plato, and in 
this blissful creative brooding the soul must share 
— for is it not of the very essence of God ? 

The home of the soul is — can be — no place, as 
we understand locality. It is a state of conscious- 
ness, rather, and one which lies not within the pos- 
sibilities of molecular matter. The vibrations of 
the latter are too coarse; its agglomerations too 
crude and harsh. Error abides here ; there can be 
no error or falsehood in the regions the soul perma- 
nently inhabits. Only truth can there abide; illu- 
sion is impossible. Sorrow can not enter there; 
woe is forgotten ; struggles and temptations are re- 
membered only as evil dreams, from which we have 
happily awakened ! 

For the home of the soul is heaven, paradise, 
nirvana ! What matters the name where all names 
fail utterly; or why attempt to describe that which 
passes description ? 

One thing unknown to mortals must be there — 
rest; and freedom from that change which here 
mars all our fleeting pleasures. To-day our be- 



THE HOME OF THE SOUL 137 

loved clasp our hands and walk by our side ; to- 
morrow they depart — forever, so far as our be- 
numbed senses can perceive. There can be — there 
must be — no to-day and to-morrow there ! It must 
be a Now which contains not even a dream or 
thought of ceasing ! For what is time but the 
crudest of all illusions ? The soul knows it not, 
even while in the body. Was there ever a time 
when it was not now to every soul? Ought not 
this wonderful fact to arouse in us a keener percep- 
tion of the nature of Being, of the impossibility of 
death, of that unalterable calm which abides by 
eternal existence ? Forms perish and pass, but the 
soul, the spiritual essence, endures forever and 
forever after ! 

From its material aspect the soul is undoubtedly 
an atom of thought-matter ; from its conscious as- 
pect, it is a unit of consciousness — a reflection 
through and by means of a material basis of that 
Infinite Unity which of necessity constitutes the 
subjective side of Being. 

It is, therefore, doubly assured of immortality; 
death of its body disrobes it of form, but touches 
not that innermost center which is life itself. Why 
this deathless, eternal center and unit of conscious- 
ness should be engaged in this weary journey 
through the Cycle of Necessity, the labyrinth of 
infinite evolution, it were idle to question. But 
being caught in the coils of matter, and recogniz- 
ing itself as a feeling, loving, suffering, experiencing 



138 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

center of consciousness, it is its right and its duty 
to seek its own source, examine its own faculties, 
test its evolved potencies, postulate its divine po- 
tentialities. Like an eagle, it must try its wings in 
the lower air first, that it may gain the power to 
cleave the pure ether. Now it is weighted by the 
fetters of matter that it may acquire the energies 
which are absolute prerequisites ere it mounts to 
higher, purer realms. 

The Self of spirit may be freed by the slow and 
laborious process of evolution ; but its recognition, 
the knowledge of its divine presence and nature, 
quickens the process a thousand fold, So, let each 
seek within in his own heart for "that light which 
lighteth every man that cometh into the world," 
for that divine Ishwara which "dwelleth in the 
heart of every creature." 

The soul is an uncrowned king, dwelling pa- 
tiently within until its divine right to reign shall 
have been recognized. It will not accept a divided 
loyalty ; it must reign alone, or it will not ascend 
the throne. It ever comforts, counsels, warns, 
checks, by its whispered admonitions ; and, indeed, 
all that the lower man has become is due to its 
compassionate care, its silent influence. What, 
then, must lie in store for the true man when the 
soul shall ascend its throne, an acknowledged sov- 
ereign and lord ? 

It is not the destiny of the soul to remain an 
exile in this land of death; a derelict drifting on 



THE HOME OF THE SOUL 139 

the sea of material life. It must some day — when 
the earth shall melt with fervent heat, and the 
heavens pass away — return to its home. This 
is in the strong, loving Thought of the Oversoul ; 
in the safe, changeless depths of Absolute Bliss. 
A wayfarer on the path of life; a weary pilgrim 
journeying to the land of the gods, let us all hope 
and trust that the parable of the Prodigal Son was 
the true vision of a Christ who had passed over 
much of the way we have yet to traverse. We have 
all erred ; we have all suffered ; we have all sinned, 
but we can each one of us atone. That tender com- 
passion for the overborne and fallen which arises 
in our own hearts surpasses not the pity and love 
of its infinite Source — it were blasphemy to enter- 
tain the morbid thought. So, let us hope on, 
struggle on ; lifting our eyes above the darkness of 
matter which now encompasses us, and some bliss- 
ful day we shall see afar off our Father's House, 
shall catch a glimpse of the Place of Peace, the 
City Beautiful, the HOME OF THE SOUL ! 



APPENDIX I 



IN DEEPER DREAMLAND 



RIGHTLY studied, there are few subjects more in- 
structive than dreams. The light they throw upon 
the mystery of life comes from many, and often 
most unexpected, sources. " Trifles light as air," though 
they be, there are yet causes lying behind them of which 
the dream gives as little indication as do the illusory 
phantoms of waking life to its realities. 

All materialistic hypotheses of life break down hope- 
lessly when applied to the phenomena of dream. The 
state is itself a profound mystery. One-third of every hu- 
man life is passed in a condition only comparable to that 
of profound swoon. Mind has entirely departed ; man 
is but a helpless clod of earth at the mercy of the weak- 
est of that kingdom of which he is the lord when awake. 
This swooning abyss, this interregnum of apparent an- 
nihilation, indicates very clearly that life is much more 
complex than would seem to be the case when its waking 
states alone are studied, for the fact that the soul returns 
from this state, and tranquilly connects itself with its past 
life, shows that there has been no real break in its con- 
tinuity ; but that the being -which feels and wills as I-am- 
myself in the waking condition has been at least existing, 
if not active, in some other state, with which waking life 



142 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

is not at present consciously correlated. Yet, if there has 
been no break in the real, there has been in the normal, 
waking consciousness, and an apparently abnormal state 
either substituted or superimposed. 

The ordinary dream has long been recognized as not 
only failing in the reasoning faculty but as occupying a 
distinctly lower moral plane than the waking conscious- 
ness. Cicero was not the first nor the last to discover this 
fact ; it is of universal experience. It points to the almost 
irresistible conclusion that man is either a dual being, 
with a Dr. Jekyll waking morality, while in sleep he is a 
Mr. Hyde, or that his true consciousness is absent during 
the latter state. The second hypothesis will appeal to 
most thinkers, for the normal consciousness is certainly 
absent in dream, and the normal is, or ought to be, one 
with the true. 

But if reason and conscience are gone, what is the na- 
ture of the decidedly lower consciousness which dreams 
these dreams without recognizing their lack of reason, or 
moral and ethical failure ? For the absence in dream of 
both reason and conscience is a strong link connecting 
these faculties, and locates them as attributes of a soul 
which would seem to be limited in its activities to the wak- 
ing state. A very important fact, bearing directly upon 
the question of the source of these reasonless and con- 
scienceless dreams, is that animals — notably dogs — un- 
questionably dream. Who has not seen the hunting dog 
re-enact the scenes of the chase, until he awakens himself 
in the act of springing upon his too vividly-imagined foe ? 
And who has not recognized the shamefacedness with 
which he mutely apologizes to his human audience for 
having yielded to such unreal folly? No one will claim 
that the animal possesses a reasoning soul, however much 



IN DEEPER DREAMLAND 143 

we may be inclined to believe the germ of this to be pres- 
ent. Analogy would certainly indicate that man in the 
dreaming state is but an animal ; and this brings us direct- 
ly to the point from which we must study dreams, if we 
would study them intelligently. For thus early are we 
brought face to face with the unavoidable deduction that 
man must be a soul occupying, or incarnated in, an animal 
body, from which, for reasons which are no doubt purely 
physical, and governed by alternating cycles of fatigue and 
rest, or waste and repair, he retires during its sleeping 
periods, leaving the body but a superior kind of sleeping 
animal which re-enacts, but confuses and distorts, the 
events of its waking life. 

The technique of this retiring of the soul from the body 
need not here concern us. The separation is evidently 
only partial, and involves the mere receding of the soul to 
those inner or ethereal states of matter upon which the 
outer or molecular body must rest — unless we take the 
unphilosophical position that there is nothing behind 
physical matter, which would then become a kind of 
material atlas, supporting the world of sentient existence 
with no foundation for its own feet. Assuming, then, for 
the time, that this relation of soul to body is true, let us 
abandon the field of these plainly animal dreams, and 
seek in deeper dreamland for further light upon the mys- 
tery of conscious existence. 

Accepting, for the present, the provisionary hypothesis 
that man is a soul occupying an animal body, the study of 
these deeper dreaming states becomes merely the tracing 
of the direct or indirect action or influence of the soul 
upon its brain and body, even though the latter be asleep. 
This hypothesis also recognizes the necessity, philosophi- 
cally, of the continuous existence of the soul, whether its 



144 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

physical body be sleeping or waking. It further recognizes 
the fact that the evolution, or widening of the conscious 
area of the soul's experiences, may go on upon more than 
one plane, and under more than one mode, at the same 
time. Thus there may be a parallel evolution to the 
physical proceeding upon an inner plane, or state of mat- 
ter, simultaneously with this, and which utilizes the ap- 
parently wasted period spent in sleep. Something of this 
kind is actually taught by Eastern philosophies, for these 
maintain that evolution takes a much wider sweep than is 
contemplated by Western theories. Besides material evo- 
lution, or that of molecular matter, the former predicates 
a similar process resulting in the acquiring of self-con- 
sciousness under other and inner material conditions. The 
soul in its evolutionary progress, they teach, has acquired 
self-consciousness under molecularly-material conditions ; 
it is in the process of acquiring this in atomic-material 
states. If the next inner, but still material, plane be 
termed astral, for want of a better word, then the soul 
must there perfect organs capable of projecting exterior 
vibrations interiorly perceived into an exteriorized world, 
in a manner analogous to its method of sensuous percep- 
tion and subsequent exteriorization of nature in this state 
of existence. It would appear that it is already beginning 
to do this, and that these deeper dreams are the first evi- 
dences of the fact. 

Who has not in dreams become conscious that he was 
dreaming ? Yet, here enters a factor entirely new, which 
quite removes this class from the ordinary, or sensuous 
dream. The influence of the soul is beginning to be felt; 
evolution is proceeding in this inner matter ; and an inner, 
or astral, set of organs are feebly commencing to function, 
in a manner similar to the uncertain steps of a child 



IN DEEPER DREAMLAND 145 

learning to walk. And this power to recognize that one is 
dreaming is capable of quick and immense expansion. So 
.very little training is required that one is almost forced 
to the conclusion that the next step in astral evolution is 
very much closer at hand than the ordinary individual 
suspects. Whether or not this be so, recognition of the 
dreaming state by dreamers is comparatively common. 
Fully developed, it constitutes a class which may, for 
descriptive purposes, be termed waking dreams. 

As far as the personal experience of the writer goes, 
these waking dreams nearly always supervene upon the 
ordinary kind. That is, one will be dreaming quite a com- 
monplace and, it may chance, senseless dream, when 
there will take place a kind of inner awakening. The 
realization that one is dreaming will come, simultaneously 
with which confused or commonplace occurrences will as- 
sume a vividness and reality placing them far above ordin- 
ary dream events, while the scenery or other environ- 
ments of the dreamer will become flooded with light, as a 
cloudy landscape might if the sun were to pour its full 
glory upon it. The cessation of this waking dream is a 
sensation of yielding to an overpowering inclination to 
sleep, to which, struggle as the delighted dreamer may, he 
must yield — to find himself not asleep, as the sensation 
would indicate, but awake to ordinary humdrum exist- 
ence. Or, the waking dream may change back into the 
ordinary senseless type without physical awakening. 

The writer has had numerous experiences of this na- 
ture. Some of these, if not instructive, are at least 
curious enough to warrant description. Before doing so, 
however, it must be premised that he accepts the hypothe- 
sis that the class of dreams under present consideration 
are subjective; are very largely, if not wholly, the ere- 



146 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

ations of the dreaming imagination. Believing thus, it 
chanced that in a waking dream a young man was present 
upon whom he was performing a trifling surgical oper- 
ation. In the midst of this, and while bandaging an in- 
jured but apparently very real arm, he remarked to the 
young man: "Look here, do you know that I created 



you 



?" 



Upon another occasion, the writer attempted to cross 
a small stream by means of the prostrate trunk of a tree, 
which unfortunately reached but part way over. Instead 
of turning back when this was noticed, he, recognizing 
that he was master of the situation, simply willed that the 
log should touch the farther bank, which it forthwith did, 
and the stream was passed. It will be admitted that 
whether the subjective theory of dream be true or not, it 
is a most comfortable one to hold when dreaming ! 

Certain of these waking dreams would indicate that 
there is at times a partial and, perhaps, imperfect ex- 
teriorization accomplished by the dreaming ego, in which 
purely subjective creations are intermingled with real ob- 
jects, and even persons normally present, such persons 
being either themselves dreaming or otherwise. Thus 
upon one occasion, finding himself in this state, the 
writer resolved to go to New York, and, further, to find a 
certain friend there. Never having visited that city, how- 
ever, he had not the slightest clue of his friend's resi- 
dence. Success apparently attended both efforts, for he 
found himself in New York, and in a residence the de- 
scription of which, as afterwards verified, corresponded 
accurately with that of the friend he was seeking. The 
friend came forward to greet him, clad in a very peculiar, 
shaggy and warm overcoat. (In San Francisco where the 
dreamer was it was warm, which makes this circumstance 



IN DEEPER DREAMLAND 147 

more remarkable). Now a very odd thing was that the 
friend had no such overcoat, but confessed to having re- 
peatedly seen in a clothier's window, and to have wished 
to possess, the exact counterpart of the one which he had 
apparently appropriated in the dream ! 

Such dreams as that just related leave it quite an open 
question in the mind of the writer whether or not real 
entities may be seen in this class of dreams. Do we not 
all live a double life — a waking and a dreaming, which as 
has been said, are not correlated ? Besides this instance, 
the writer once awakened to find himself in the very large 
park adjoining his own city — San Francisco. Here he 
met two young ladies, one of whom he accosted and asked 
her to give him her place of residence so that he might be 
able to verify it in the morning ; he fully recognizing the 
fact that he was dreaming. This in a most naturally 
modest manner she hesitated to do, but upon being urged, 
and the reason for the request made plain to her, she 
yielded so far as to admit that her name .was Mott, and 
that she was visiting friends living upon Ellis street. The 
writer begged earnestly for the exact number, but while 
she hesitated the familiar and overpowering sensation of 
sleepiness came upon him, and he awakened before ob- 
taining the coveted information. From the manner of 
the young lady, he is certain that she at least had no idea 
that the occurrence was a dream, until she awakened and 
found it so — providing always that it all was anything 
more than his own dreaming imagination. 

Certain of these dreams would seem to be quite under 
the sway of both conscience and reason, showing that the 
true soul was cognizant of, if not actually concerned in, 
them. Thus in one the writer was approached and solicit- 
ed to accompany as pretty and bright a bevy of young 



148 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

houris as heart could wish for; but deliberately turned 
away from them. Upon another occasion this temptation 
was repeated, except that there was but one female, and 
the look of sarcastic, tempting derision upon her fascin- 
atingly beautiful features will not soon be forgotten. Also 
in still another, in which the dreamer was riding in the 
midst of a most bright and beautiful landscape, his horse 
chanced to stumble. In what would have been a very 
normal waking pet, the writer swore at him, when the 
landscape instantly changed from its previous golden 
brightness in a most remarkable manner, the gloom ap- 
pearing to close in from all sides until visible objects had 
disappeared except for a very few feet in the immediate 
vicinity. This seemed to be a purely mechanical effect of 
the disturbance of the ether by vibrations set up by the 
oath, much as the transparency of a pool is destroyed 
when a stone is thrown in it; and, if a real occurrence, il- 
lustrates how a seemingly trifling fit of anger o± other 
passion destroys the tranquility of the soul's physical 
mirror, the brain, and annuls all possibility of the per- 
ception of higher things. 

Once the dreaming consciousness accustoms itself to 
this inner awakening, it is curious to observe how accur- 
ately it will carry over any information bearing upon this 
state which it learns in waking life. Thus in the case of 
being annoyed by certain elementals, the writer had been 
told that a violent blow from an imaginary sword would 
effectively dispose of them. And it chanced, it may be 
because of this information, that in another waking dream 
he was attacked by a grotesque figure, very much resem- 
bling a Chinaman, which was armed with a formidable 
sword. Remembering his instruction, he advanced boldly 
and struck it a swinging blow with another sword, which 



IN DEEPER DREAMLAND 149 

even in the dream was entirely imaginary. The imp 
curled up in death, with a curious expression of having 
been vanquished by superior knowledge, for which it bore 
not the slightest malice. Yet the dreamer promptly se- 
cured the sword of his vanquished foe, with the remark 
to himself that imaginary swords were well enough in 
their way, but if he had to do any more fighting he pre- 
ferred a real one ! 

Often in these deeper dreams knowledge superior to 
that of the dreamer seems to be possessed by his drama- 
tized creations, just as in the case of ordinary dreams. 
Thus the writer had puzzled for a long time over a knotty 
metaphysical problem, when in a waking dream he 
chanced to meet a supposed Hindu yogi. The question 
being referred to him, he promptly decided directly oppo- 
site to the view held by the writer when awake, and 
which decision, upon further study and investigation, 
proved to be correct, although it was months before the 
writer was able to solve by his reason the problem which 
his own dreaming creation had decided instantly. Such 
instances, as before remarked, raise the question whether 
or not real entities may be encountered in these dreaming 
conditions. If this is not so, they point conclusively to 
the fact that the soul, even when partially disembodied in 
dreams, possesses powers far transcending its normal 
waking capacities. They also seem to prove the theory, 
maintained in Eastern metaphysics, that the soul is a 
divine being whose proper habitation is upon planes of 
pure thought, and that by incarnating in these molecular- 
ly-constructed bodies it loses almost wholly its divine 
reasoning powers, and is thus swayed by the passions of a 
body, with which this very loss causes it to ignorantly 
identify itself. 



150 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

In fact, dreams show by their gradings into classes in 
which the conscience and reason slowly emerge from an 
entirely reasonless and conscienceless condition, that the 
relation of the soul to the body is one very far from being 
fixed by any hard and fast line. The point of union is 
unquestionably the line of unstable equilibrium, pointed 
out by Herbert Spencer, along which all evolutionary 
progress must take place. Upon this subjective and mys- 
terious battlefield the real contest of eternity is waged, 
and whatever dominion over matter mind possesses has 
been won in a silent conflict maintained throughout ages 
whose duration the mind itself in its incarnate state 
fairly reels if it attempts to grasp. And this point is 
eternally varying, in both dreaming and waking states. 
Eastern wisdom avers that spirit, or consciousness, and 
matter are but aspects of an Absolute Unity, with which 
it makes no attempt to deal for the very good reason that 
finite minds can not comprehend infinite problems. But, 
granting these two aspects, it holds that matter passes by 
an uninterrupted gradation to states which to ether are as 
the latter is to granite. And all of these inner material 
conditions are present in man as well as in every object in 
nature, for each object of whatever kind rests upon some 
material cause from its material aspect, and upon a con- 
scious cause, from this aspect ; these two final causes 
blending in the Absolute itself. It thus rejects entirely 
the theory that there are, or can be, disconnected objects 
in the universe which exist aimlessly in space, and 
which have no root in, or hold upon, the divine. 

At any rate, the corollary that the mind uses differing 
material vehicles in its varying relations with the body, is 
borne out very strongly by the phenomena of dream as 
well as those of waking life. In the ordinary senseless 



IN DEEPER DREAMLAND 151 

dream the thinking soul has abandoned nearly all relation 
to molecular matter, and man is a dreaming animal. As 
the dreams become more reasonable the soul is approach- 
ing more and more to its normal relations with the body. 
We at once can see how under passion and desire it would 
be driven from one material vehicle to another, until at 
last it is compelled by the very violence of the passion 
to loose all control over its animal associate, which then 
does those passionate and unreasoning deeds at which in 
its normal condition the soul sickens. The dream in 
which the landscape closed in and was blotted out by an 
angry word well illustrates this. And one can perceive 
that once consciousness in dream is attained how much 
superior must its sleeping tranquility and hushed passions 
be to the proper functioning of the soul than the tornado 
of waking life. 

Among these deeper dreams must be classed those 
which distinctly foretell events ; especially dreams of 
premonition or warning. Thousands might be instanced ; 
let a single one suffice for an example. A father living in 
Oakland, a suburb of San Francisco, dreamed that his 
son, a small lad, was drowned. So vivid was the impres- 
sion created that he refused to go to work the next morn- 
ing until the boy had given his word not to go upon the 
water that day. Later on the lad succeeded in convincing 
his mother that his father's fears were foolish, went out 
boating and was drowned. The father in his dream had 
seen the lifeless body dragged into a boat — doubtless 
a merely dream-dramatized detail, as the body was not 
recovered. 

If, as these higher dreams seem to show, there is in 
man a soul superior to and independent of his body, then 
it can easily happen that a strange, unaccountable dream 



152 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

may be a page torn from the records of a former and for- 
gotten life. For there can be no effect without its ante- 
cedent cause, and, therefore, every dream must arise in 
some actual experience in consciousness. Therefore, 
science correctly enough finds in the ordinary sense dream 
a confused recalling of the thoughts and scenes of the 
waking hours. But when a connected, sequential dream 
happens which from its very nature could not have had its 
basis in thoughts, acts, or in the environments, even, of 
this life, it is but logical to presume that it is the living 
over and re-enacting of some strongly impressed detail of 
a forgotten one. In dream, then, might often be found 
the thread of Ariadne by means of which we may grope 
our way into the labyrinths of an otherwise buried 
pre-existence. 

There are many by-paths in dreamland into which one 
would delight to wander, but these are forbidden because 
interminable. There is, however, a lesson to be learned 
from dreams which must not be overlooked. That is, that 
in every dream there is an entity which dreams that 
dream. No one will admit that it is himself in his nor- 
mal state which dreams senseless or vicious dreams. 
They are accredited in some vague manner to the imagina- 
tion when divorced, in some equally mysterious manner, 
from reason and conscience. But even the study of 
dream shows that the soul can take no part in these ; that 
it is independent of and most probably away from the 
body when they occur. Then, taking into consideration 
the unquestioned fact that animals dream, it logically 
follows that such low dreams are the work of the human 
brain alone, and whether we relegate the causes of them 
to external or internal stimuli, automatism, or what not, 
the fact remains that some entity that must be conscience- 



IN DEEPER DREAMLAND 153 

less and unreasoning perceive and records them. It can- 
not be the reasoning soul or moral and rational distinc- 
tions would be made. It is idle to talk of nothing per- 
ceiving something, yet this is the strait to which we are 
reduced unless we accept the fact that some entity dis- 
tinctly below the human plane — reason and conscience 
both being absent — dreams these dreams. 

And that this is the fact one experience of the writer 
strongly indicates. In awakening from a dream upon a 
certain occasion, the real I of the writer seemed to be in 
the attitude of a spectator so far as its relation to the 
body was concerned, and for a brief moment watched in 
wondering awe the process of a dream which was then 
actually occurring. There appeared to be an entity like 
to his body in appearance, engaged in active thought, and 
in some incomprehensible manner these thoughts ap- 
peared to be thrown upon the brain as pictures, and 
which pictured thought constituted the dream. The 
process of dream would seem to be similar to a magic 
lantern entertainment, except that the presence of the 
operator in the dream is not suspected. 

The inference is plain and unavoidable, in view of the 
above study, that man would seem to be associated with 
an animal body in which is enthroned an animal entity 
similar in nature to other entities in the animal kingdom. 
This association is neither idle nor fortuitous ; it occurs 
under the universal law of cause and effect, and one can 
easily imagine its object to be the slowly lifting up of the 
lower entity into the human or reasoning condition, while 
at the same time an almost infinite amount of experience, 
with its resulting wisdom, is gained by the food for thought 
afforded a purely thinking soul during its experiences 
while thus incarnated among entities entirely below it, 



154 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

and in whom the ruling principal is desire. The further 
thought is also forced upon one that, as this association is 
not, or can not be, under the laws of nature, fortuitous, 
it has persisted during perhaps innumerable lives in the 
past and must so persist in future ones, which doctrine 
is the very essence of the fact, and the reason for, reincar- 
nation. Therefore, in the most senseless and vicious 
dreams may be read the record of the impressions which 
man's mind has imparted to his unreasoning associate. 
In them one may learn the precise point to which he 
would descend were his soul to desert him, and may also 
test how pure and unselfish his thoughts are upon interior 
planes of which no one knows, or can catch even a 
glimpse, except his own soul. The real morality of the 
waking ego is undoubtedly reflected in the dreaming one, 
and he who habitually dreams cruel or immoral dreams 
may be sure that these taint, it may be all unsuspected, 
the garments of his soul, and that it would be well to set 
about living that life and thinking those thoughts that 
would render it impossible for his lower self to dream 
such dreams. For even admitting the fact that most of 
these are dramatizations of some external (a noise) or 
internal (indigestion) stimuli, yet the sequence of that 
dramatization will depend entirely upon the real ten- 
dencies of the hidden mind of each individual. Thus 
a drop of water falling upon the face of two individuals 
will be dramatized in the one into storm and ship- 
wreck, it may be, while, to the other, they will unfold 
into the dramatization of the scenes of one of the Roman 
baths of old. Let me repeat it ; each one may form a cor- 
rect estimate of the general tendencies, moral or other- 
wise, of his mind by the careful study of even his most 
absurd dreams. For, in the case of the writer the delight 



IN DEEPER DREAMLAND 155 

of the dreaming entity, thus caught in the act of dream- 
ing while the real I was away from the body, was intense, 
but still animal-like in nature. So strong was it, that the 
writer no longer wonders at men yielding to sensuous 
gratifications urged upon them by their animal associate. 
He must have a strong will who can sternly forbid and 
prevent the projecting of unclean images into his brain- 
mind. 

One point more. Some will say they never dream. 
Change this into "they never remember their dreams," 
and it will be correct. Kemembering dreams is a habit 
easily cultivated. The scientist reads a book and remem- 
bers all its details ; the child reads a novel, and recalls it 
vividly, while the blase man or woman will cram novel 
after novel without being able to recall anything unless re- 
read. The scientist deliberately, though unconsciously, 
it may be, wills to impress his mind with what he reads ; 
the child is interested. This is the clue. Become inter- 
ted in your dreams, and try to remember them, and you 
will find the fact following upon the heels of the wish. 



APPENDIX II 



THE WORLD'S CRUCIFIED SAVIOURS 

THE principal object of the Universal Brotherhood or- 
ganization being to establish the fact that men are 
brothers in the fullest sense that the term con- 
notes, it will be at once evident that to reconcile religious 
beliefs must prove a most important means to this end. 
No wars are so bitter as those fought under the banners of 
differing faiths ; no quarrel so vindictive as that where 
each antagonist believes himself to be defending truth 
and God against error and blasphemy. 

It can be demonstrated beyond peradventure that all 
religious faiths and beliefs have a common ancestry — are 
all the offspring of an old Wisdom Keligion, which, in 
these later days, has become known under the title of 
Theosophy, or, literally, the " Wisdom of the Gods." It 
is said by the Wise Ones that this Wisdom Religion was 
originally taught to this humanity in its infancy by beings 
from other spheres who had passed through that arc of 
the Cycle of Necessity which we are now treading, and 
because of this knew whereof they taught. Certain it is 
that a very brief examination of comparative religion will 
demonstrate that a time when the gods (or God) walked 
with men was a matter of universal belief. Jehovah 
walking in the Garden of Eden is only one, and a com- 



THE WORLD'S CRUCIFIED SAVIOURS 157 

paratively recent, variant of an account to be found in 
the mythology of every religion. Whatever may have 
been the original source of the teaching it is absolutely 
certain that every religion worthy of the name descends 
from this archaic parentage. No unbiassed student will 
deny this for a moment. Modern science and materialistic 
philosophy make of the evident one-ness of pagan myth 
and Christian teaching their strongest argument for dis- 
crediting the divine source of any and all religions. 

But this agreement, while a stumbling block to the 
narrow-minded sectarian who would compel all men to ac- 
cept his faith, however illogical, and to the materialist 
who recognizes nothing divine in any religion, becomes an 
all-compelling argument to him who seeks to unify the 
race ; to prove to men that religion is a common heritage ; 
that God has never forgotten the world ! While the dog- 
matist may be dismayed, the lover of the race will be re- 
joiced to find that all men are really praying to the same 
gods, are fighting the same foes, are striving for the same 
goals of purity and peace. Each new link forged, each 
new fact dug out of the buried records of the past, will be 
to him a new joy, for it brings one step nearer the day 
when men shall no longer face each other in fratricidal 
struggles because one names that as Jehovah which others 
know as Brahm, Zeus, or Osiris ; when all shall be so wise 
that they will no longer disagree because of the name if 
the inner meaning be one. 

This old Wisdom Religion presents as a basis for its 
philosophy of life (for what is any religion more than 
this?) certain fundamental concepts, which must be at 
least briefly studied preparatory to showing that all re- 
ligions root in these teachings, and are all really one in es- 
sence and in their divine origin. These are : {a) Evolu* 



158 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

tion conceived of in such wide, deep, and universal as- 
pects that that taught by modern science only describes a 
small arc of its infinite and perfect circle, (b) That the 
law of cause and effect governs every plane of the uni- 
verse physical, mental, moral, or spiritual. (c) Re- 
embodiment, or the eternal re-clothing of the inner, im- 
mutable, spiritual essence in mutable, material forms^and 
as a corollary, the re-birth of the human soul in succes- 
sive bodies, (d) All religions proceed from a common 
source ; have their origin in the old, universal Wisdom 
Religion, referred to before. 

The evolution of the Wisdom Religion teaches that 
spirit, or consciousness, eternally descends into matter, 
and as eternally re-ascends out of it in immense cycles of 
evolutionary activity. All manifested existence proceeds 
in cycles, or recurring periods of objective existence in 
material form followed by subjective arcs, thus maintain- 
ing the continuity of life unbroken. In the heavens are 
now visible worlds in every stage of material life-cycles, 
from the nebulous, through the fiery sun stage, to the cool, 
habitable (for entities clothed in flesh) one of earth. 
Others again are apparently dead and re-embodying their 
vitality in newer planets, as has the moon ; or, finally be- 
coming so ethereal and tenuous that they can no longer 
be seen by physical means, as is said to have happened 
with one or two intra-Mercurial planets. The objective life- 
cycle of worlds is thus plainly written in the strata of the 
heavens making up the abysses of visible space about us. 

Descending from cosmos to earth the law of cyclic life 
is found to be absolutely unbroken. It is seen in the life 
and death of man ; in the recurrence of night and day ; of 
the seasons ; in all the phenomena of life. As this ma- 
terial universe must proceed from the Causeless Cause, it 



THE WORLD'S CRUCIFIED SAVIOURS 159 

logically follows that this universally imposed limitation 
of cycles is a law of the very Absolute unto itself, and as 
such imposed upon all its emanations. 

This primal and perhaps infinite cycle of manifestation 
is composed of an almost equally infinite number of lesser 
cycles. So it must happen that within this great period 
will always be found worlds in every stage of evolutionary 
activity. In our own system the sun and moon represent 
uninhabitable stages — at least for such beings as our- 
selves — while the Earth and Venus and Mars, probably, 
are in habitable stages, but at differing arcs of the evolu- 
tion of their humanities. Therefore, it follows that there 
are and have always been other humanities than ours, ma- 
tured and perfected upon other planets. There are upon 
the earth no two individuals at exactly the same stage of 
their intellectual, moral, and spiritual development, and 
the same divergence, only in greater degrees, marks the 
different humanities, for, as stated in the Secret Doctrine, 
every entity in the universe either is, was, or prepares to 
become, a man. These humanities, therefore, which have 
passed beyond our condition have their egos at varying 
stages of attainment, and the less advanced are able to 
impart their wisdom to advanced earth egos. That is to 
say, that nature never proceeds by leaps nor breaks ; and 
there is always possible that interblendi .ig and intercom- 
munication between egos of different world periods which 
enables past humanities to teach those of worlds coming 
after them. Humanities are necessarily in relation, 
and correspond, to the ordinary human family. Upon 
the accumulated wisdom and experience of the parents, 
the children have a lawful lien, and in like manner it is 
the duty of the parents and elder brothers of this race to 
impart to it their wisdom. 



160 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

The Wisdom Eeligion then, comes from and is the heir- 
loom of our humanity from a humanity which has passed 
through these material stages, and which has transmit- 
ted to us as our heritage their knowlegde thus ac- 
quired. 

The religious instinct is innate and universal, for each 
ego at the beginning of its human experience has had im- 
pressed upon it this Primal Wisdom. Befeides this, man 
retains a certain memory or reminiscence of a divine state 
which he has lost by his fall into matter. The faint mem- 
ory, the far-off reminiscence, of this state persists in us to- 
day, and lies, it may be, at the bottom of every effort to 
attain to something purer, truer and higher than man 
now is. For this reason even the religion of a Bushman is 
to be respected. It expresses the desire of his soul to re- 
gain a lost spiritual condition, the memory of which still 
unconsciously haunts him. 

One of the strongest evidences of all religions having 
this common origin, is the myth (and truth) of a crucified 
Saviour. This is an universal myth. The cross itself is the 
most ancient symbol existing. On the cosmic plane it is a 
symbol of the descent of spirit into matter; on the hu- 
man, of man's soul, fallen and incarnated in a fleshly 
body. 

The cross has never been anything else but a symbol. 
There is not a particle of evidence to show that there has 
ever been a Saviour really crucified, all these myths to 
the contrary, notwithstanding. The myth means, and 
means only, that the soul of man is crucified in the 
fleshly desires and appetites of its sensuous body, and not 
that any particular Saviour has suffered death in this 
manner. 

In reference to this, it is a significant fact that Euse- 



THE WORLD S CRUCIFIED SAVIOURS 161 

bius, 1 one of the early Christian Bishops, declares, upon 
the authority of the martyr, Polycarp, that it was ac- 
cepted among all the early church Fathers that Jesus of 
Nazareth was never crucified, but on the contrary lived to 
be fifty years of age. But crucifixion is not the only 
key to the Saviour legends. All our souls may be said to 
be crucified in the flesh, while the origin of these Saviour 
myths, is either the voluntary descent and incarnation of 
high souls of former humanities, or the equally voluntary 
relinquishment of glorious spiritual states won, by ad- 
vanced souls of this humanity who reincarnate at times 
of great spiritual debasement. To thus save humanity 
by restoring lost spiritual truths, is the meaning which 
runs through all these myriad stories of crucified Saviors. 
It is the meaning, certainly, which the early Christians 
gave to the crucifixion of Christ. If he were really cruci- 
fied, contemporary history ought to have noted it. The 
Jewish historian, Josephus, was a bitter opponent of his 
kinsman, Herod, and recorded all his wicked acts and it is 
not reasonable that he would have omitted to mention in 
this connection such a remarkable occurrence as the mas- 
sacre of infants. 

There is no Christian teaching which has not been an- 
ticipated by other teachers long previous to the era of 
Christ. Especially does the story of a crucified Saviour 
appear in all histories or legends of great religions. 
There are historical accounts, allusions, or legends of the 
following crucifixions : 2 



1 Irenseus. 

2 This list of Saviours is from the "World's Crucified Saviours," by 
Kersey Graves, from which work many of the authorities mentioned 
are quoted. 



162 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

1 Chrishna, of India, 1200 years B. C. 

2 Sakia of Hindustan, 600 years B. C. 

3 Thammuz, of Syria, 1100B. C. 

4 Wittoba, the Telingonese, 552 B. C. 

5 Iao, of Ne.paul, 622 B. C. 

6 Hesus, of Great Britain, 834 B. C. 

7 Quexalcote, of Mexico, 587 B.C. 

8 Quirinus, of Rome, 506 B. C. 

9 Prometheus, of Greece, 547 B. C. 
10 Thulis, of Egypt, 1700 B. C. 
n Indra, of Thibet, 725 B. C. 
12 Alcestos, of Greece, 600 B. C. 
13 Atys, of Phrygia, 1170 B. C. 
u Crite, of Chaldea, 1200 B. C. 
15 Bali, of Orissa, 725 B. C. 
16 Mithra, of Persia, 600 B. C. 

Other Saviours declared to have been crucified also, but 
the date of which event is uncertain, are : Salvahana, of 
Bermuda; Osiris, of Egypt; Horus, of Egypt; Odin, of 
Scandinavia ; Zoroaster, of Persia ; Baal, of Phoenicia ; 



1 The Hindu Pantheon. 

2 Progress of Religious Ideas. 

3 Ctesias. quoted in Higgins' Anacalepsis. 

4 Anacalepsis. 
5 Georgius. 

6 Anacalepsis. 

7 Mexican Antiquities. 

8 Higgins' Anacalepsis. 

9 Seneca and Hesiod. 
10 Wilkison. 

11 Georgius. 

12 Anacalepsis. 

13 Anacalepsis. 

14 Anacalepsis. 

15 Anacalepsis. 
16 Faber and Bryant. 



THE WORLD'S CRUCIFIED SAVIOURS 163 

Taut, of Phoenicia; Bali, of Afghanistan; Xamolxis, of 
Thrace ; Zoar, of the Bonzes ; Adad, of Assyria ; Deva 
Tat, of Siam ; Alcides, of Thebes ; Mikado, of the Shintos ; 
Beddru, of Japan ; Thor, of the Gauls ; Cadmus, of 
Greece ; Hil and Feta, of the Mandaites ; Gentaut, of 
Mexico, and several others, of lesser note. 

If the influence of the World's Saviours upon humanity 
be> judged by their present following, it is interesting to 
note that Chrishna has 400,000,000 adherents ; Christ, 200,- 
000,000; Mahomet, 150,000,000; Confucius, 120,000,000; 
and Mithra, 50,000,000. 

Their histories are strangely similar ; too much so not 
to have been derived from a common source. Let us take 
as a type that of Chrishna. 1 It is said of him that his 
birth was foretold ; that he was an incarnate God ; his 
mother a virgin ; that he had an adopted father who was 
a carpenter; that there was rejoicing on earth and in 
heaven at his birth ; that his mother's name was Maia. 
He was born in obscurity on December 25th ; was vis- 
ited by wise men and shepherds who were led by a 
star; was warned of danger by an angel; that all the 
children near his birthplace were ordered destroyed in 
order to include him ; that his parents fled to Mathura. 
(An ancient legend states that Joseph and Mary jour- 
neyed to a place called Mateira, where they fled from 
Herod into Egypt.) He had a forerunner (Bali-Kama) ; 
was wise in childhood ; was lost and searched for by his 
parents ; had other brothers ; retired to solitude ; fasted ; 
preached a noteworthy sermon ; was entitled a Saviour, 
Redeemer, Shepherd, Lion of the tribe of Sakia ; existed 



1 " Three hundred and forty-six Striking Analogies Between 
Christ and Chrishna," Loc Cit. 



164 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

prior to birth ; and on earth and in heaven at the same 
time ; was both human and divine ; did miracles of which 
one or the first was to cure a leper ; healed all manner of 
diseases ; raised the dead ; cast out devils ; had apostles ; 
reformed the existing religion ; abolished law of lineal de- 
scent in priesthood ; was poor ; was conspired against ; de- 
nounced riches ; meek ; unmarried and chaste ; merciful ; 
associated with sinners ; was rebuked for it ; befriended a 
widow ; met a gentle woman at a well ; submitted to in- 
juries and insults ; was a practical philanthropist; had a 
last supper ; was crucified between two thieves ; darkness 
supervened ; descended to hell ; was resurrected after 
three days ; and seen by many people. 

Again, of Quexalcote, 1 the Mexican Saviour, we are 
told, that he was born 300 years before Christ ; of a spot- 
less virgin ; that he lived a life of humility and piety ; 
retired to a wilderness and fasted forty days ; was 
worshipped ; crucified between two thieves ; descended to 
hell and rose again the third day ; rode on an ass ; forgave 
sin, etc. 

As it will be impossible in the short space of a chapter 
to note the similar important incidents in the life of each 
Saviour separately, merely the incident will be noted, and 
under it grouped all the Saviours of whom there is trust- 
worthy evidence of that particular event having been re- 
corded. Let us, then, as an appropriate beginning, take 
the prophecies concerning their birth. Under this head 
we find that the coming to earth of Chrishna, Chang-Ti, 
Osiris, Cadmus, Quirinus, and Quexalcote were all thus 
foretold, while prophecies of Saviours run through nearly 



1 Mexican Antiquities, Vol. VI, Codex Borgianus. Codex Vati- 
canus. 



THE WORLD'S CRUCIFIED SAVIOURS 165 

all sacred writings. Thus the Vedas, the Chinese Sacred 
Books, 1 those of Egypt, Greece, Rome, Mexico, Arabia, 
Persia, etc., contain Messianic prophecies. Of Saviors 
connected in some manner with a Serpent-symbol, we 
have Osiris, spoken of as having bruised the serpent's 
head after it had bitten his heel ; Hercules is represented 
with his heel on . a serpent's head ; Chrishna is both 
pictured and sculptured with his heel on a serpent's 
head ; Persia has the same legend to the effect that 
Ormuzd made the first two pure, and that Ahriman took a 
serpent-form in order to tempt them. 
Miraculous conceptions are recorded of : 

Plato, who was said to have been a son of Apollo ; 

Zoroaster, 2 born of a Ray of Divine Wisdom ; 

Mars and Vulcan, conceived by Juno ; 

Quexalcote, 3 of Suchiquetqual ; 

Yu, 4 of a lily, or a star ; 

Appolonius, 5 of Proteus ; 

Buddha, of Mahamaya ; 

Chrishna, of Yasoda, by Narayana. 

Jesus, of Mary, by the Holy Ghost. 
Of Virgin Mothers 6 we have : 

Yasoda, mother of Chrishna ; 

Maia, of Sakia; 

Celestine, of Zulis ; 

Chimalman, of Quexalcote ; 

Semele, of Bacchus ; 

Prudence, of Hercules ; 

1 Martinus — " History of China." Halde— " History of China." 
2 Malcolm— " History of Persia." 

3 Mexican Antiquities, Codex Vaticanus. 

4 Tod—" History of the Rajahs." 

5 Philostratus. 

(i Higgins— Anaoalepsis. 



166 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

Alcmene, of Alcides ; 
Shing-mon of Yu ; 
Mayence, of Hesus ; 
Mary, of Jesus. 
Angels, shepherds, magi, etc., visited: 

1 Confucius, 

2 Chrishna, 

3 Sakia, 

4 Mithra, 

5 Pythagoras, 

6 Zoroaster, and Jesus. 

The births of many were preceded by the appearance of 
a new star, and occurred upon December 25th, formerly 
the beginning of the new year. Of those to whom this 
date is specifically assigned we have : 

Bacchus, 

Adonis, 

Chrishna, 

Chang-ti, 

Chris (of Chaldea), 

Mithra, 

Sakia, 

Jao (of Ancient Britain), and Jesus. 
Jesus is often poetically spoken of as the Lamb of God. 
Other nations have been equally poetical in the titles they 
have given their particular Saviour. Thus we find Chrish- 
na spoken of as the Holy Lamb ; Quexalcote, as the Ram 



1 Five Volumes. 

2 Ramayana. 

3 New Covenant Religion. 

4 History of Persia. 

5 Progress of Religious Ideas. 

6 Aristotle and Pliny. 



THE WORLD'S CRUCIFIED SAVIOURS 167 

of God ; the Celts had their holy Heifer ; and Egypt its sa- 
cred Bull. 

Of Jesus and Chrishna it is recorded that they were 
born in caves, for the manger in which the birth of the 
former is declared to have occurred was hollowed out of a 
hillside. 

Of infants threatened by hostile rulers, we have : 

Bacchus, 

Romulus, 

Chrishna, 

Osiris, 

Zoroaster, 

Alcides, 

Yu, 

Rama, 

Indra, 

Salvahana, and Jesus. 
The two last were sons of carpenters. (World Build- 
ers ? ) 

The Wisdom Religion affirms that there are seven keys 
to all these myths according as we read them in a hu- 
man, terrestrial, cosmic, or other sense. To turn the as- 
tronomical key to the above, we find that Herod means 
the "Hero of the Skin," or Hercules, and that the Sun 
(Hercules) enters Gemimi in May. Rachel equals Ramah, 
and Ramah means the Zodiac in both Indian and Chal- 
dean astronomy. Rachel had Joseph and Benjamin ; 
Gemimi has two stars. He who runs may easily read. 

Of those who descended into hell and were resurrected 
after three days, we have : 

Quexalcote, 

Chrishna, 

Quirinus, 



168 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

Prometheus, 

Osiris, 

Atys, 

Mithra, 

Chris, and Jesus. 
If we examine the doctrines of these Saviours we shall 
find the same close analogy, bespeaking a common 
origin, that the " Religion of Jesus Christ is neither 
new nor strange," as was asserted by Eusebius, and that 
St. Augustine was quite right in claiming that: " This in 
our day is the Christian religion, not as having been un- 
known in former times, but as recently having received 
that name." 

Among other resemblances we note that the doctrine 
of the Trinity was recognized in Brahmanism, Zoroas- 
trianism, and in the religions of Chaldea, China, Mexico 
and Greece. Speaking of this doctrine of the Trinity, 
Bishop Powell declares : "I not only confess but I main- 
tain such a similarity between the Trinity of Philo and 
that of John as bespeaks a common origin." The cere- 
mony of the Eucharist was also observed by the Essenes, 
Persians, Pythagoreans, and Gnostics who used as ele- 
ments bread and water. It also was recognized and 
taught by the Brahmans and Mexicans. St. Justin indig- 
nantly remarks of it : l ' And this very solemnity an evil 
spirit introduced into the mysteries of Mithra." The 
pious Faber also laments that: "The devil led the 
heathen to anticipate Christ in several things, as for ex- 
ample, the Eucharist." Baptism by water, fire, air or 
spirit, was a portion of the sacred teachings of the Ro- 
mans, Egyptians, Zoroastrians, Jews, Hindus, Greeks and 
Chaldeans. 

Throughout all, and the golden thread which is the re- 



THE WORLD'S CRUCIFIED SAVIOURS 169 

ligion, or rebinding of them all, run the teachings of re- 
incarnation, karma and universal brotherhood. And it is 
needless to remark that all of them endeavored to make 
this latter teaching practical. The golden rule is found in 
the mouths of all of them, as was to have been expected. 
Below are a few instances taken mostly from the teachings 
of their disciples. 

Confucius, 500 B. C. — Do unto another what you would 
have him do unto you. Thou needest this law alone. It 
is the foundation for all the rest. 

Aristotle, 385 B. C. — We should conduct ourselves 
toward others as we would have them act towards us. 

Pittacus, 650 B. C. — Do not to your neighbor what you 
would take ill from him. 

Thales, 464 B. C. — Avoid doing what you would blame 
others for doing. 

Isocrates, 338 B. C. — Act towards others as you would 
desire them to act towards you. 

Sextus, 406 B. C. — What you wish your neighbors to be 
to you such be to them. 

Hillel, 50 B. C. — Do not to others what you would not 
like others do to you. 

There are many more quotations which show the real, 
inner agreement better than a host of external forms. 
For example: 

Buddha — A man who foolishly does me wrong, I will 
return to him the protection of my ungrudging love ; the 
more evil comes from him, the more good shall go from 
me, Hatred does not cease by hatred at any time ; hatred 
ceases by love ; this is an old rule. 

Lao-Tse — The good I would meet with goodness. The 
not good I would meet with goodness also. The faithful I 
would meet with faith. The not faithful I would meet 



170 THE EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY 

with faith also. Virtue is faithful. Recompense injury 
with kindness. 

Manu — By forgiveness of injuries the learned are 
purified. 

Kwan-Yin — Never will I seek nor receive private, in- 
dividual salvation ; never enter into final peace alone ; but 
forever and everywhere will I live and strive for the uni- 
versal redemption of every creature throughout the 
world. 

Philo, the Essenian — It is our first duty to seek the 
kingdom of God and his righteousness. 

Socrates, voicing the divine wisdom left as the heirloom 
of Greece by Pythagoras — It is not permitted to return 
evil for evil. 

If men would seek for points of agreement in their 
separate faiths, and rejoice when a new one had been 
found, how quickly would all this religious intolerance 
disappear ; how the hands of all who recognize rever- 
ence and adoration as the highest and holiest faculty of 
the soul would be strengthened for their common conflict 
with those who believe and teach that man is but as the 
beasts of the field, who are to-day, and to-morrow are not. 
The Nazarine declared that he had other sheep " Not of 
this fold"; Chrishna, that "In whatever way men ap- 
proach me, in that way do I assist them," and again, " In 
whatever form a devotee desires with faith to worship, it 
is I alone who inspire him with constancy therein." 

He who reveres the God-like man, and he who wor- 
ships the man-like God, may both have the same thought 
in their inmost heart. Certainly, all who worship THAT, 
under whatever term they may seek to make it compre- 
hensible to the finite intellect, ought to have no quarrel 
over words, and he who, in a spirit of sympathy and tol- 



THE WORLD'S CRUCIFIED SAVIOURS 171 

erance for all, studies the inner essence of the world's 
great religions will quickly discover that words, and 
words alone, divide them, and that if one is true, all are. 
And who will dare assert that all religions are false ? 



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The demonstration of these broad ideas from the ethical, 
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SEP 19 1899 






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